Next Generation Exabit/s Data Center Network Supporting All Optical Circuit and Packet Switching

Nowadays, we have witnessed an exponential increase of intra-data center (DC) traffic and various emerging applications. Consequently, to support the scaling up of the needed link bandwidth in the DC, optical fibers and transceivers have been extensively deployed to realize highspeed data transmission. However, current electrical data center networks (DCNs) still face severe issues of high latency, low scalability, as well as high cost and energy inefficiency. With the progress of optical switching technologies, the above issues could be potentially solved in the optical domain together with a reconfigurable network topology and control mechanism to adapt to the heterogenous DCN traffic patterns. In this article, we discuss various optical switching technologies and the related DCN topologies. We also propose and investigate the performance of a novel, all optical, switching architecture with sphere topology (AOSphere) supporting capacity of exabit/s.