Digital signal processing for intra- and inter-data centre applications

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The effectiveness of many of today's technological advances are enabled by remote access to vast processing and storage facilities; also known as 'The Cloud'. These remotely accessed resources are hosted by data centres, which can host thousands of interconnected servers. Optical fibres are used to support high speed data connection between servers within a data centre (intra-data centre). Similarly, groups of data centres can be clustered together to enhance the size of the available resource pool. These are also connected via optical fibre communication systems (inter-data centre). Due to the challenge of buffering and routing optical signals, routing is currently achieved using optical-electrical-optical conversion, via electrical switches.However, in the cloud architecture of the future, increasing data traffic demands and computing resources highlight that the capability of electrical network switches will not scale in line with Moore's law. Intelligent optical networks and intelligent transceivers may provide a solution for the next generation data-centre optical networks, thus replacing electrical switching. This PhD will focus on investigating whether ultra-fast optical switching in combination with coherent detection and simplified digital signal processing will be an enabling technology for the continued scaling of data centre network bandwidth. This PhD will advance the fields of both digital signal processing (under a significant computational resource constraint) and all-optical switching, potentially demonstrating the potential of an entirely new optically connected data centre .Relevance to EPSRC thematic areas:Information and communication technologies (subthemes: optical communications, digital signal processing, ICT networks and distributed systems, Optical devices and subsystems), Physical sciences.