Wavelength assignment in Optical Network-on-Chip: Design and performance

Photonic interconnect can provide high bandwidth with low power consumption, which makes Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) a promising alternative for the next-generation high performance Chip multiprocessors. To make better use of the optical interconnect, Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is commonly used for the sake of providing higher bandwidth and decreasing the contention possibility. In this paper, we propose two wavelengths assignment methods for mesh topology: source-based wavelength assignment (SW) and destination-based wavelength assignment (DW). We evaluate their performance in simulations, and the results show that allocating wavelengths according to the source node outperforms destination-based assignment in terms of latency and throughput.