Abstract

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D. Agrawal, M. Baldi, M. Corra, G. Fontana, T. H. Truong, G. Marchetto, V. T. Nguyen, Y. Ofek, D. Severina, O. Zadedyurina, "Multi-terabit per Second Scalable Switch Prototype," Technical Report, Internal Publication, January 2006.

Abstract
As data traffic on the Internet continues to grow exponentially, there is a real need to solve the switch bottleneck by developing ultra-scalable switching fabrics. Although in recent years there have been a lot of efforts to solve the switching fabric scalability problem, in the optical domain, the proposed solutions have been (very) expensive, (very) complex and (much) larger than electronic switching fabric alternatives. Unfortunately, electrical interconnection of existing (off-the-shelf) electronic switching devices is very difficult due to wave reflections on transmission lines, impedance mismatching, crosstalk and noise.
Consequently, electronic switching with electrical interconnections has major scalability limitations. Thus, the question is whether and how optical interconnects can be used to link off-the-shelf electronic switching devices in order to develop optoelectronic switching fabrics that can scale up to 10-100 terabit per second (Tb/s) capacity in a single chassis. In order to further increase the scalability of the proposed novel optoelectronic switching fabric a UTC-based (coordinated universal time) time driven switching (TDS) or fractional lambda switching (FλS) architecture is proposed. This novel low-complexity switching architecture capitalizes on the ubiquitous of UTC from GPS and Galileo. TDS architecture is especially suitable to support high capacity streaming media applications over the Internet.