Performance of photonic interconnection networks

A procedure to evaluate the normalized bandwidth of interconnection networks for linking M transmitters to N receivers, is derived. Its validity is quite general: it holds for multistage interconnection networks and for generalized shuffle networks. These architectures are particularly suitable for photonic implementations, because, in this case, exchange network with buffering and delay are not easily usable. The networks are assumed to be parallel synchronous. The analysis shows that bandwidth reduces if the number of stages grows. This drawback can be overcome by exploiting the speed of the photonic technologies.