VLAN-based routing infrastructure for an all-optical circuit switched LAN

Exploring the use of all-optical MEM switches on Local Area Network (LAN) to increase bandwidth and reduce energy cost has received increasing attention. Compared to traditional electronic switches, an all-optical switch provides higher bandwidth, less energy cost and cheaper wiring. Once the optical port count per switch becomes a resource constraint, an all-optical switched core can change the network topology dynamically to redistribute bandwidth resources between computing hosts. This feature is particularly useful for stream processing systems whose communication patterns vary over time and where rebalancing of networking resource is needed periodically. The work we present in this paper is a practical solution for high level software systems to route through a reconfigurable optical MEM switched LAN. Our solution can be readily applied on commercial switches with standard Layer-2 protocols. Network reconfiguration time and round-trip delay are measured. Our implementation is validated with the IBM System S stream processing system.