Experimental research in high capacity communications for data centers

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In 2013, the amount of data processed yearly in data centers surpassed the Zettabyte (or 1021 bytes, or the trillion Gigabyte) threshold, while the massive progress in social networking, cloud computing and big data applications continues. With a compound annual growth rate of 32% per the CISCO global cloud index, data center traffic is expected to reach 14.1 Zettabytes by the end of 2020 . Traffic that remains within data centers accounts for more than 75% of the overall data center traffic. These trends are pushing research for Petabit per second (Pb/s) rates within future data centers. The Pb/s target will require multiple multiplexing strategies and ad-vanced modulation, all within the tight cost constraints of the data center.Achieving Pb/s transmission rates requires a system that pushes boundaries simultaneously along all multiplexing avenues: advanced modulation formats, spectrally efficient operation, coverage of multiple wavelength bands, and spatial multiplexing in modes and/or multiple cores. To keep costs low, solutions must be compatible with trends to monolithically integrated optical and electrical components. Among the various technologies to implement optical com-ponents, silicon photonics is particularly attractive as it holds the potential for small footprint, low cost, low power consumption and scalability . In addition, the advent of software defined networks and interest in flex-grid architectures place constraints on viable Pb/s system strate-gies. The proposed five-year research project will focus on exploring how results in optical multiplexing can be harnessed with WDM and QAM modulation to achieve Pb/s on a single fiber in a point-to-point or mesh network at short distances (< 5 km). The project will push the state-of-the art in several directions