WDM optical interconnects with recirculating buffering and limited range wavelength conversion

All-optical communication, in particular, wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technique, has been proposed as a promising candidate to meet the ever-increasing demands on bandwidth from emerging bandwidth-intensive computing/networking applications. However, with current technology, the cost of optical communication, especially the cost of optical buffering and wavelength conversion, remains a major concern for such applications. In this paper, we study WDM optical interconnects that utilize low cost recirculating buffering and limited range wavelength conversion. We first consider the packet scheduling problem in this type of interconnect, and formalize the problem of maximizing throughput and minimizing packet delay as a matching problem in a bipartite graph. We give an optimal parallel algorithm for this problem that runs in O(Bk²) time, compared to O((N+B)³k³) time if directly applied to existing matching algorithms for general bipartite graphs, where N is the number of input/output fibers of the interconnect, B is the number of fiber delay lines, and k is the number of wavelengths. We also consider efficient switching fabric designs for this type of interconnect. We distinguish between the switching fabric connecting the input fibers to the output fibers and the switching fabric connecting the input fibers to the delay lines and show that by adopting the idea of concentration, the cost of the latter can be reduced significantly in terms of the number of crosspoints.