Capacity Enhanced Receivers for Low Latency Burst Optical Slot Switching Rings
11 February 2016
We propose a new receiver architecture for coherent detection in slotted optical packet switching rings with elastic (rate adaptive) optical transponders. Such rings are a candidate solution for future datacen- ter and metropolitan networks. The new receiver can detect more than a single packet per time slot and con- sequently has higher flexibility (translating into higher supported capacity, or, equivalently, lower end-to-end latency, or a combination or both), at the cost of a mod- erate increase in the transponder complexity and energy consumption (less than 10%). We apply network plan- ning and traffic engineering simulation tools (which we validate on small examples using theoretical models) to quantify the increase in network capacity and latency reduction that can be achieved thanks to the use of the new receivers. Finally, we have identified the sta- bility problem of the insertion process in the rings with the coherent receivers, and have proposed a polynomial network planning algorithm, for the case of fast-tunable transmitters. We have evaluated the cost of enforcing the stability, in terms of the additional transponders needed, for the mentioned case.