Capacity Enchanced Receivers for Optical Slot Switching Rings

In this paper, we propose a new receiver architecture for coherent detection in optical packet switching rings with elastic (rate adaptive) optical transponders. Such rings are a candidate solution for future data center and metropolitan networks. The new receiver can detect more than a single packet per time slot and consequently has higher flexibility and bandwidth efficiency, at cost of slight increase in its energy consumption. We apply network planning and traffic engineering simulation tools and theoretical models to quantify the increase in network capacity and reduction in its latency, that can be achieved thanks to the use of the new receivers. Our results show that the new receivers significantly increase the network capacity (up to 30%), and can reduce the network latency by several orders of magnitude.