An Optical Wavelength Switching Architecture for a High-Performance Low-Power Photonic NoC

The paper proposes a scalable wavelength-switched optical NoC, named as SWS-ONoC. The proposed architecture is built upon a novel all-optical router which passively routes optical data streams based on their wavelengths. Utilizing wavelength routing method, SWS-ONoC eliminates electrical transactions for optical resource reservation and hence, reduces latency and area overheads of the electrical units. The proposed architecture benefits from Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) scheme to efficiently route multicast optical packets concurrent with unicast data streams. Performing a series of simulation-based experiments, we study efficiency of the proposed architecture, its power and energy consumption, and data transmission delay under a hybrid traffic pattern, composed of multicast and unicast packets.