Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure Network Team’s Contributions at ECOC 2023: Papers, Tutorial, and Workshop on Optical Data Center Networks

From October 1‑5, 2023, the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) was held in Glasgow, United Kingdom, gathering nearly 1,500 participants and presenting about 600 reports covering photonic chips, devices, and ground, subsea, and space optical communications.

Alibaba Cloud’s Infrastructure Network team contributed a technical paper titled “Unavailability Analyses of Hyperscale Data Center Interconnect Optical Networks,” which for the first time offers a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of factors causing optical network outages, identifying fiber impairments as the primary source and demonstrating how reducing their impact can improve network stability by orders of magnitude.

The team also delivered a tutorial called “Future Data Center Optical Networks,” where they discussed the requirements of cloud data centers for optical transport, described the architecture of inter‑data‑center optical networks, and highlighted Alibaba Cloud’s innovations such as open line systems, heterogeneous open‑decoupled MESH networks, white‑box optical devices, an open‑source optical network operating system, and advances in rate, power, and size reduction, as well as digitalization, automation, and intelligence of optical networks.

In a dedicated workshop titled “Is building a multi‑fiber network as simple as stacking single‑fiber networks?”, Alibaba Cloud presented the paper “Scaling Network Capacity with Multi‑Fiber Networking for Large Webscale Companies,” arguing that C+L‑band technologies will first be adopted by large internet companies and that multi‑fiber networking, while not a simple aggregation of single‑fiber links, requires coordinated network management, spatial‑frequency routing, and switching techniques to maximize efficiency.

Continuing its open‑collaboration approach, Alibaba Cloud’s Infrastructure Network team commits to advancing world‑class data‑center network infrastructure, sharing research at top conferences such as OFC, ECOC, and SIGCOMM, and fostering high‑quality cooperation between industry and academia to drive both practical deployments and theoretical progress.