Prototyping Optical Ethernet—A Network for Distributed Data Centers in the Edge Cloud

Low latency requirements are driving the data center business into the metro area, the so-called Edge Cloud. We investigate the new networking requirements and how they can be served by our Optical Ethernet framework. We elaborate why the Edge Cloud requires true packet switching in the metro network, instead of today’s dominating packet transport in static channels. And we report prototyping results, where we verify to which extent our Optical Ethernet framework provides true packet switching, how it scales to reasonable node counts, and how to satisfy persisting needs for dedicated lossless and jitter-free point-to-point connections in the scope of the same architecture.