SMONoC: Optical network-on-chip using a statistical multiplexing strategy

Optical interconnect can provide high bandwidth and low latency, which is considered as a good candidate for future multicore systems. To maintain the scalability of optical networks and simultaneously support high performance communication, we propose a Statistical Multiplexing Optical Network-on-Chip (SMONoC), a new architecture targeting dynamic channel allocation for high channel utilization, a modest amount of photonic devices for low integration cost, and statistical multiplexing for a simple arbitration scheme. The SMONoC consists of two layers, one optical layer for data transmission and one electrical layer for controlling and scheduling. With the introduction of the statistical multiplexing strategy, the SMONoC avoids the confliction between different cores with low complexity. The simulation results show that the SMONoC is a low-latency and high-throughput architecture with high channel utilization under both synthetic traffic patterns and real traffic patterns.