Scalable optical-core network
AssigneeRockstar Consortium US LP
InventorMaged E. Beshai
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A network comprising a large number of electronic edge nodes interconnected through bufferless optical switch planes so that a signal from any edge node to any other edge node traverses only one switch plane scales to a capacity of hundreds of petabits per second while providing global geographic coverage. Each edge node is time-locked to each optical switch plane to which it connects to enable loss-free time-sharing of the network core despite the absence of buffers in the core. In an alternate implementation, a relatively small number of electronic switch units may be employed in a predominantly-optical core. In addition to scalability and high performance, the simple structure of the network significantly simplifies addressing and routing.
Claims14
A network comprising:
- a plurality of switch planes each comprising a plurality of first switch units, each of the first switch units being interconnected to at least two of the other first switch units through a plurality of second switch units to thereby conduct bidirectional network traffic between each of the first switch units and the at least two other first switch units, each of the first switch units having a switching latency less than a switching latency of each of the second switch units and a dimension less than a dimension of each of the second switch units;
- and
- a plurality of edge nodes each having at least one upstream channel to at least one of the first switch units and at least one downstream channel from at least one of the first switch units.
A network comprising:
- a plurality of switch planes, each switch plane comprising a plurality of first switch units, each of the first switch units being interconnected to at least two of the other first switch units through a switch-plane core, the switch-plane core comprising:
- a plurality of second switch units wherein each of the first switch units has a switching latency less than a switching latency of each of the second switch units and a dimension less than a dimension of each of the second switch units and wherein each of the second switch units is configured to conduct bidirectional network traffic between each of the first switch units and the at least two other first switch units;
- at least one electronic switch unit having a dimension exceeding the dimension of each of the second switch units;
- and
- a switch-plane controller in communication with a selected one of the at least one electronic switch units;
- and
- a plurality of edge nodes each having at least one upstream channel to at least one of the first switch units and at least one downstream channel from at least one of the first switch units.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.