Designing WDM Optical Interconnects with Full Connectivity
by Using Limited Wavelength Conversion

Yuanyuan Yang
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA

Abstract

Optical communication, in particular, wavelength division multiplexing
(WDM) technique, has become a promising networking choice to meet
ever-increasing demands on bandwidth from emerging bandwidth-intensive
computing/networking applications. A major challenge in designing WDM
optical interconnects is how to provide maximum connectivity while
keeping minimum hardware cost. The overall hardware cost of a WDM
optical interconnect includes not only the cost of switching elements,
but also the cost of wavelength conversion. Previous work mainly
focused on minimizing hardware cost without taking into consideration
of the type of wavelength converters used.  In this talk, we show how
to design WDM optical interconnects with full connectivity by using
the low cost limited wavelength converters.  We present optimal WDM
optical interconnects for both permutation and multicast in single
stage and multistage implementations. We also discuss the impact of
the relationship between the number of fibers and the number of
wavelengths per fiber on the optimal design. As can be seen, the newly
designed WDM optical interconnects have minimum hardware cost in terms
of the number of crosspoints and wavelength conversion cost.