Hybrid optical switching for data-intensive media grid applications

Jurgen Baert, Marc De Leenheer, Bruno Volckaert, Tim Wauters, Pieter Thysebaert, Filip De Turck, Bart Dhoedt, Piet Demeester Dept. of Information Technology, Ghent University – IBBT – IMEC Gaston Crommenlaan 8 bus 201, 9050 Gent, Belgium Tel: +32 (0)9 33 14900 Fax: +32 (0)9 33 14899 E-mail: ABSTRACT Emerging service grids are being challenged by an increasing number of jobs, larger job sizes, the demand for more storage and computational resources, and ever-rising bandwidth and latency requirements. A specific case of these grids, designed to administer highly demanding media applications (including media production environments) are the so-called media grids. Even though optical networking is the apparent technology of choice for high-bandwidth applications, the question arises whether current burst/packet and circuit switching solutions are flexible enough for the design and development of these next generation optical service grids. This paper introduces the concept of a media grid, deduces the requirements for such a grid. Furthermore, this paper proposes hybrid optical switching for the underlying network architecture, which is expected to substantially increase the overall system performance, compared to single-technology solutions.