SWIFT: A High Capacity Wavelength-striped Optically Switched Network
with Electronic Control
Michael Dales
High capacity optical networks are well established in the long-haul
networks arena, with new developments, such as all optical switching,
being pursued to further benefit these networks. Research at Intel has
shown that high capacity optical links can offer advantages for short
range networks such as device interconnects and computer
clusters. However, there are many challenges in taking the
technologies used in the long-haul networks and applying them to short
range networks.
Here we present a semisynchronous, multi-wavelength striped optical
network architecture with an electronic control system, suitable for
short range networks from SANs and small LANs down to chip
interconnects. We outline the challenges involved, and examine how our
short range architecture overcomes them. We also present SWIFT, the
Semisynchronous Wavelength Striped Interconnect Flexible Testbed, a
novel optical testbed designed to enable evaluation of our network
design with a combination of physical medium evaluations, low-level
synthetic traffic and real world applications.
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