A WDM based virtual bus for universal communication and computing systems

The authors propose a scalable interconnection network architecture called virtual bus to solve the diverse and nonuniform traffic encountered in a universal system. They exploit the feasibility of using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technologies to reduce the wiring complexity and the power consumption of the virtual bus. The scalability and the broadcasting capability of the virtual bus are achieved by hierarchical clustering of WDM buses and by interconnecting the WDM clusters via highly parallel VLSI based switches. It is shown that a high performance WDM virtual bus design sustaining giga packets and tera bits per second nonuniform traffic can be implemented efficiently