Patent ID: 11924592
Assignee: TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT EINDHOVEN
Field: Telecommunications (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 0:
1. A method of operating an optical switch in an optical data center network (DCN), comprising the steps of:
providing a first network interface card (NIC), having a first label channel part and a first data channel part, configured in a first top of rack (ToR) of a first server rack comprising multiple servers;
providing a second NIC, having a second label channel part and a second data channel part, configured in a second ToR of a second server rack comprising multiple servers;
providing an optical switch in communication with the first data channel part via a first data channel and the second data channel part via a second data channel;
configuring a switch controller in communication with the first label channel part via a first label channel and the second label channel part via a second label channel;
utilizing the first label channel and the second label channel to distribute a clock frequency and synchronization time from a master clock of the switch controller to the first and second NICs;
measuring a physical fiber transmission delay of the first label channel and the second label channel;
compensating the received synchronization time with the measured physical fiber transmission delay;
transmitting, by at least one of the first and second label channels, destination information of data packets carried by paired label packets to the switch controller from at least one of the first and second NIC;
simultaneously transmitting, by at least one of the first and second data channels, data packets aggregated by at least one of the first and second NIC to the optical switch from at least one of the first and second NIC;
generating, by the switch controller, switch-enabling signals to configure the optical switch based on received label destination information; and
configuring the optical switch to send the data packets to a destination port.