Contrasting Power Efficiency of Contention Resolution vs. Avoidance Strategies in Optical Ring Interconnects for Photonically-Integrated Embedded Systems

The fundamental choice to be taken when sharing an optical ring between multiple communication actors is whether to avoid contention from the ground up by means of non-interfering concurrent transmissions on different wavelengths, or by resolving it at runtime through arbitration mechanisms.This paper aims at assessing power efficiency of Wavelength-Selective vs. Wavelength-Arbitrated routing methodologies on top of an optical ringfor photonically-integrated high-end embedded systems.