Numerical and experimental study of a cascaded microelectromechanical system-based all-optical data center interconnect

Abstract. As the scale of the intra-data center network (DCN) grows even larger, the traditional electrical switching has reached a bottle neck in terms of energy consumption, bandwidth provision, and end-to-end latency. Different approaches have been made by employing the optical switch instead of the electrical ones to solve the bandwidth as well as the energy efficiency and the latency problem. We propose a DCN architecture based on cascaded microelectromechanical systems switches for dynamic DCN connectivity provisioning. This architecture provides high port count, which attributes to the demands of the intradata center traffic. Multiple points to one point switching scenario is experimentally demonstrated through this data center interconnect. Numerical simulation is employed to investigate the performance of the proposed architecture. The results show that the blocking probability and latency decrease as the scale of the architecture is upgraded.