A Fast Control Plane for a Large-Scale and High-Speed Optical Circuit Switch System

TL;DR

Data center optical circuit switches require rapid reconfiguration across thousands of racks. This paper presents MEOW, a fast, FPGA-enabled, EtherCAT-based multi-master control plane built on top of ONOS to drive large-scale OCSes with typical configuration times of about $100\mu s$ and low jitter. The key contributions are the FPGA-based multi-master EtherCAT implementation (up to six masters per chip), an ONOS-based control framework with service- and data-oriented traffic engineering, and experimental validation showing worst-case configuration times around a few hundred microseconds for up to 1000 racks. The results suggest a scalable, cost-effective approach to achieving data-center-scale high-speed OCS control, with potential improvements by faster data links and increased parallelism.

Abstract

We experimentally verify a fast control plane with 100 microseconds of configuration time that can support more than 1000 racks, leveraged by a software-defined network controller and an industrial real-time Ethernet standard EtherCAT.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: The overview of MEOW control plane
• Figure 2: MEOW device controller (left) and MEOW device (right)
• Figure 3: Experimental Configuration
• Figure 4: Sample timing charts. ① the simple network controller starts sending the configuration request, ② the master starts sending the request to slaves, ③ All slaves activate it, and ④ Jitter of the configuration time.