All optical switching networks with energy-efficient technologies from components level to network level

The key current challenges for the industrial application of all optical switching networks are energy consumption, transmission rate, spectrum efficiency, and switching throughput. The energy consumption problem is mainly researched in this paper. From the perspective of components and modules, node equipment, and network levels, different enabling technologies are proposed to overcome this problem, which are also evaluated through different experimental demonstrations. First, high-sampling-rate digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and WSS-based ROADM modules are demonstrated as components and modules for energy-efficient all optical switching networks. Then, an all optical transport network test-bed consisting of 10 Pbit/s level all optical switching nodes based on multi-level and multi-planar switching architecture is experimentally demonstrated for the first time, which can reduce power consumption by 43%. A control architecture for energy-efficient all optical switching networks is built with OpenFlow based software defined networking (SDN), and experimental results are given to verify the performance of this control architecture. Finally, we describe an All Optical Networks Innovation (AONI) project in China, which aims to explore transmission, switching, and networking technologies in all optical switching networks, and then two application scenarios are forecast based on the technical breakthroughs of this project.