Chen, Yuhua2020-01-032020-01-03December 22014-12December 2https://hdl.handle.net/10657/5677Because 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.application/pdfengThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).DWDMBurstChannelPort2020-01-03Thesisborn digital