A scalable silicon photonic chip-scale optical switch for high performance computing systems.

This paper discusses the architecture and provides performance studies of a silicon photonic chip-scale optical switch for scalable interconnect network in high performance computing systems. The proposed switch exploits optical wavelength parallelism and wavelength routing characteristics of an Arrayed Waveguide Grating Router (AWGR) to allow contention resolution in the wavelength domain. Simulation results from a cycle-accurate network simulator indicate that, even with only two transmitter/receiver pairs per node, the switch exhibits lower end-to-end latency and higher throughput at high (>90%) input loads compared with electronic switches.

Rapid and complete hitless defragmentation method using a coherent RX LO with fast wavelength tracking in elastic optical networks.

This paper demonstrates a rapid and full hitless defragmentation method in elastic optical networks exploiting a new technique for fast wavelength tracking in coherent receivers. This technique can be applied to a single-carrier connection or each of the subcarriers forming a super-channel. A proof-of-concept demonstration shows hitless defragmentation of a 10 Gb/s QPSK single-carrier connection from 1547.

Dynamic on-demand defragmentation in flexible bandwidth elastic optical networks.

While flexible bandwidth elastic optical networking is a promising direction for future networks, the spectral fragmentation problem in such a network inevitably raises the blocking probability and significantly degrades network performance. This paper addresses the spectral defragmentation problem using an auxiliary graph based approach, which transforms the problem into a matter of finding the maximum independent set (MIS) in the constructed auxiliary graph. The enabling technologies and defragmentation-capable node architectures, together with heuristic defragmentation algorithms are proposed and evaluated.

Experimental demonstration of flexible bandwidth networking with real-time impairment awareness.

We demonstrate a flexible-bandwidth network testbed with a real-time, adaptive control plane that adjusts modulation format and spectrum-positioning to maintain quality of service (QoS) and high spectral efficiency. Here, low-speed supervisory channels and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) enabled real-time impairment detection of high-speed flexible bandwidth channels (flexpaths). Using premeasured correlation data between the supervisory channel quality of transmission (QoT) and flexpath QoT, the control plane adapted flexpath spectral efficiency and spectral location based on link quality.