From Small to Large: Clos Network for Scaling All-Optical Switching
Published in IEEE Communications Magazine, 2023
Recommended citation: J. Lin, Z. Chang, L. Zong, S. K. Bose, T. Chang and G. Shen, "From Small to Large: Clos Network for Scaling All- Optical Switching," IEEE Communications Magazine, 2023. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10210476
Authors: J. Lin, Z. Chang, L. Zong, S. K. Bose, T. Chang, G. Shen
Abstract: To cater to the demands of rapidly growing Internet traffic, backbone networks need high-degree reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) to simultaneously support multiple pairs of bi-directional fibers on each link. However, the traditional ROADM architecture based on the Spanke network is too complex to be directly scaled up to construct high-degree ROADMs. Because of this, Clos networks are considered as promising alternatives for constructing largescale ROADMs. In this article, we look at a next-generation Closbased ROADM architecture and show that it indeed provides better blocking performance with lower element and fiber complexities compared with a traditional Spanke-based (i.e., fully connected in the backplane) ROADM architecture. We also compare insertion loss, power consumption, and system cost of these architectures, which further illustrates the potential of the Clos-based ROADMs.