Power and scalability analysis of multi-plane optical interconnection networks

The scalability of current electrical interconnection networks will be soon limited by their power consumption and dissipation. To overcome such an issue, multi-plane optical interconnection networks have been proposed. Multi-plane networks are composed of a number of cards, each of them supporting a number of ports, interconnected through a passive optical backplane. Two switching domains are envisioned to be exploited allowing for flexible switching of data packets across all ports and cards. This study considers three different implementations that are representative of the multi-plane optical interconnection networks based on space and wavelength switching. The implementations differ from each other in the switching domain used. The aim of the work is to investigate the power consumption and scalability of the three implementations, based on state-of-the-art 40 Gb/s technology. The physical layer analysis and the power consumption assessment including both electronic and optical components indicate that the implementation can impact on the scalability as well as the power consumption. The arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG)-based implementation is found to suffer from scalability and power consumption issues. On the other hand, an implementation based on active switches shows an energy efficiency similar to the coupler-based implementation, but a four-fold scalability increase.