Reconfigurable Scheduler for Stackable Optical Fabric

Because of the high bandwidth demand, the optical fabric becomes very important in Internet infrastructure. The switching technologies also pose unique challenges for optical fabric. The optical infrastructure has to face all these challenges created by advanced Internet technologies as well as the challenge of scalability of optical fabric. This thesis proposes a novel stackable structure of optical fabric which is easy to expand and has low installation cost. In this work, the concept of reconfigurable scheduler for stackable optical fabric has been introduced, and the architecture of this scheduler has been designed. The scheduler considers intrinsic connectivity of physical layers as well as the service requirements of the application layer. In order to verify the design, the prototype was designed and realized on a FPGA board. For evaluating the cost saving of the proposed stackable optical fabric, a general cost model was developed and compared with the flat optical fabric. The stackable fabric was observed to be the trade-off between cost and performance.