Nephele: Vertical Integration And Real-Time Demonstration Of An Optical Datacenter Network

Riding on Moore's law, established datacenter network infrastructure technologies are scaling up rapidly; however, increasing concerns are being expressed by the industry that these technologies could be outpaced in the near future by the sheer growth of the traffic and new technologies are sought. In this backdrop, optical switching is gaining momentum as a potential path for gracefully scaling datacenter networks, due to its inherent speed, energy efficiency and transparency to bitrate and protocol. European project NEPHELE is developing an optical network infrastructure that leverages optical switching within a software-defined networking (SDN) framework to overcome the bandwidth and energy scaling challenges of datacenter networks. Within this project, a vertically integrated optical datacenter network test-bed prototype was set up and its operation was demonstrated in lab environment. Different scenarios using the NEPHELE dataplane are reported, underpinning the feasibility of the proposed network architecture. Moreover, dynamic allocation of network resources is also envisaged, leveraging the slotted operation of the reported optical datacenter network. Finally, the evaluation of a Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS) based on commercial off-the-self-components is reported, scaling up to eight wavelengths and enabling optical switching in ultra-fast dynamic operation.