A petabit photonic packet switch (P³S)

This paper presents a new petabit photonic packet switch (P³S) architecture that is highly scalable both in dimension and capacity while maintaining high system performances. Using a new multi-dimensional photonic multiplexing scheme that includes space, time, wavelength, and sub-carrier domains, we propose a photonic switch fabric based on a 3-stage Clos network to provide scalable large-dimension photonic interconnections with nanosecond reconfiguration speed. Packet buffering is implemented electronically at the input and output port controllers, allowing the central photonic switch fabric to transport high-speed optical signals without electrical-to-optical conversion. Optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) technology further scales port speed beyond electronic speed up to 160 Gbits/s to minimize the fiber connections. To solve output contention, we propose a new arbitration scheme, called Frame-based Exhaustive Matching (FEM), using extended frames to aggregate cells from different incoming lines. The extended frame relaxes the stringent arbitration time constraint at a 160 Gbit/s port speed. Based on the FEM scheme in the proposed architecture, a 6400 × 6400 switch with a total capacity of 1.024 petabit/s can be achieved with throughput close to 100% under various traffic conditions.