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

Claim 6:
7. An optical switching system for an optical data center network (DCN), comprising:
a first network interface card (NIC), having a first label channel part and a first data channel part, in a first top of rack (ToR) of a first server rack comprising multiple servers;
a second NIC, having a second label channel part and a second data channel part, in a second ToR of a second server rack comprising multiple servers;
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; and
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;
wherein at least one of the first and second label channels is configured to deliver destination information of data packets carried by paired label packets to the switch controller from at least one of the first and second NIC;
wherein at least one of the first and second data channels is configured to simultaneously transmit 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;
wherein the switch controller is configured to generate switch-enabling signals to configure the optical switch based on received label destination information;
wherein the optical switch is configured to send the data packets to a destination port; and
wherein the system is configured to utilize 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, measure a physical fiber transmission delay of the first label channel and the second label channel, and compensate the received synchronization time with the measured physical fiber transmission delay.