Optical Switching Data Center Networks: Understanding Techniques and Challenges

Relying on the flexible-access interconnects to the scalable storage and compute resources, data centers deliver critical communications connectivity among numerous servers to support the housed applications and services. To provide the high-speeds and long-distance communications, the data centers have turned to fiber interconnections. With the stringently increased traffic volume, the data centers are then expected to further deploy the optical switches into the systems infrastructure to implement the full optical switching. This paper first summarizes the topologies and traffic characteristics in data centers and analyzes the reasons and importance of moving to optical switching. Recent techniques related to the optical switching, and main challenges limiting the practical deployments of optical switches in data centers are also summarized and reported.