Optical interconnection networks for cloud data centers [Guest Editorial]

The rise of Cloud Computing and Big Data has created the need for morepowerful warehouse-scale cloud data centers, which usually comprise hundreds of thousands ofservers with highaccess bandwidth (>10Gb/s) or more, and cost-effective intra- and inter- data center networks(DCNs) to provide switching and interconnect among all servers. However, the current DCNs sufferfrom limited throughput, large latencies and highpower consumption, and will not be able to sustainthe projected future DCN traffic demandswithout consuming excessive amounts of power. Optical interconnection networks capable of supporting high throughput, high bandwidth, low latency, low power consumptionand full-bandwidth communication among all servers have been proposedas a promising solution by performing switchingat the optical domain, thus greatly improving the performance of the cloud data centers.