Literature Survey on Optical Data Centre Networks

Data centre networks are currently experiencing a dramatic increase in the amount of network traffic that needs to be handled due to cloud technology and several emerging applications. To address this challenge, mega data centres are required with hundreds of thousands of servers interconnected with high bandwidth interconnects. Current data centre networks, based on electronic packet switches, consume a huge amount of power to support the increased bandwidth required by the emerging applications. Optical interconnects have gained more and more attentions as a promising solution offering high capacity and consuming much lower energy compared to the commodity switch based solutions. This thesis provides a thorough literature study on optical interconnects for data centre networks that are expected to efficiently handle the future traffic. Two major types of optical interconnects have been reviewed. One is referred to hybrid switching, where optical switching deals big flows while electronic switches handles traffic in packet level. The other one is based on all-optical switch, where power-consuming electronic interconnects can be completely avoided. Furthermore, the thesis includes a qualitative comparison of the presented schemes based on their main features such as topology, technology, network performance, scalability, energy consumption, etc