In astronomy, interferometry by ground-based telescopes offers the greatest angular resolution. However, the Earth´s atmosphere distorts the incident wavefront from a celestial object, leading to blurring and signal loss. It also restricts the transmission of specific wavelengths within the electromagnetic spectrum. Space-based interferometers would mitigate atmospheric obstruction and potentially enable even higher angular resolutions. The main challenge of implementing space-based interferometry is the necessity of matching the light´s optical path differences at the telescopes within the coherence length of the light utilizing physical delay lines. This thesis explores the potential realization of digital delay lines via heterodyne interferometry. The technique generates a heterodyne beat note at the frequency difference between the incident stellar light and a reference laser in the radio regime, permitting digitization of the delay line while preserving the phase information for image reconstruction. The primary objective of the thesis is to advance the field of astronomy by constructing a testbed environment for investigating future space-based heterodyne interferometry in the NIR light range. It requires the achievement of two main tasks. Firstly, a laboratory starlight simulator is developed to simulate a distant star´s wavefront appearance as it reaches telescopes on or around Earth. The consequent starlight simulator contains an optical assembly that manifests a point source in NIR light, aligned with a mirror collimator’s focal point, transforming the wavefront from spherical to planar. Secondly, a fiber optical circuit with interference capability is constructed, consisting of a free-space optical delay line and a polarization-controlled custom-sized fiber. The delay line matches the optical paths within the light's coherence length, while the polarization controller optimizes interference visibility. The completion of the tasks establishes the foundation to investigate space-based heterodyne interferometry in the NIR light with the potential implementation of delay line digitization.

A datacenter hosts hundreds of thousands of servers and a huge amount of bandwidth is required to accommodate communication between thousands of servers. Several packet switched based datacenter architectures are proposed to cater the high bandwidth requirement using multilayer network topologies, however at the cost of increased network complexity and high power consumption. In recent years, the focus has shifted from packet switching to optical circuit switching to build the data center networks as it can support on demand connectivity and high bit rates with low power consumption. On the other hand, with the advent of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), the role of datacenters has become more crucial. It has increased the need of dynamicity and flexibility within a datacenter adding more complexity to datacenter networking. With NFV, service chaining can be achieved in a datacenter where virtualized network functions (VNFs) running on commodity servers in a datacenter are instantiated/terminated dynamically. A datacenter also needs to cater large capacity requirement as service chaining involves steering of large aggregated flows. Use of optical circuit switching in data center networks is quite promising to meet such dynamic and high capacity traffic requirements. In this thesis work, a novel and modular optical data center network (DCN) architecture that uses multi-directional wavelength switches (MD-WSS) is introduced. VNF service chaining use case is considered for evaluation of this DCN and the end-to-end service chaining problem is formulated as three inter-connected sub-problems: multiplexing of VNF service chains, VNFs placement in the datacenter and routing and wavelength assignment. This thesis presents integer linear programming (ILP) formulation and heuristics for solving these problems, and numerically evaluate them. / Ett datacenter inrymmer hundratusentals servrar och en stor mängd bandbredd krävs för att skicka data mellan tusentals servrar. Flera datacenter baserade på paketförmedlande arkitekturer föreslås för att tillgodose kravet på hög bandbredd med hjälp av flerskiktsnätverkstopologier, men på bekostnad av ökad komplexitet i nätverken och hög energiförbrukning. Under de senaste åren har fokus skiftat från paketförmedling till optisk kretsomkoppling for att bygga datacenternätverk som kan stödja på-begäran-anslutningar och höga bithastigheter med låg strömförbrukning. Å andra sidan, med tillkomsten av Software Defined Networking (SDN) och nätverksfunktionen Virtualisering (NFV), har betydelsen av datacenter blivit mer avgörande. Det har ökat behovet av dynamik och flexibilitet inom ett datacenter, vilket leder till storre komplexitet i datacenternätverken. Med NFV kan tjänstekedjor åstadkommas i ett datacenter, där virtualiserade nätverksfunktioner (VNFs) som körs på servrar i ett datacenter kan instansieras och avslutas dynamiskt. Ett datacenter måste också tillgodose kravet på stor kapacitet eftersom tjänstekedjan innebär styrning av stora aggregerade flöden. Användningen av optisk kretsomkoppling i datacenternätverk ser ganska lovande ut for att uppfylla sådana trafikkrav dynamik och hög kapacitet. I detta examensarbete, har en ny och modulär optisk datacenternätverksarkitektur (DCN) som använder flerriktningvåglängdsswitchar (MD-WSS) införs. Ett användningsfall av VNF-tjänstekedjor noga övervägd för utvärdering av denna DCN och end-to-end-servicekedjans problem formuleras som tre sammankopplade delproblem: multiplexering av VNF-servicekedjor, VNF placering i datacentret och routing och våglängd uppdrag. Denna avhandling presenterar heltalsprogrammering (ILP) formulering och heuristik för att lösa dessa problem och numeriskt utvärdera dem.