Switching Functions of a Data Center Top-of-Rack (ToR)

In Data Centers each rack uses a Top-of-Rack (ToR) as a first level switch to connect servers to the aggregation switches. The current paper focuses on a hybrid electrical/optical ToR design, which first, adapts the servers Ethernet traffic to the optical TDMA operation of the core network for supporting optical switching in the Data Center’s upper layer and second, it employs optical switching of traffic at the rack level. The proposed ToR architecture is based on an Ethernet switch and FPGA port extensions realizing the required functions to support 20 10Gbps connections, exploit the network routing resources and handle effectively virtual queues.