Time-multiplexing Optical Interconnection Networks; Why Does It Pay Oo?

Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) is typically applied whenever the capacity of a resource is larger than the individual requirements of any of its clients. This is the case in optical interconnection networks in which the bandwidth of an optical path is much larger than the rate at which a processor can generate data. However, in addition to closing the gap between the bandwidth of electronic processing and that of optical transmission, I argue in this paper that multiplexing optical networks is essential to reduce the overhead of controlling the network. This reduction is a result of increasing the number of connections that do not require control operations. I present a preliminary model to specify the communication requirements of applications and use this model to gain some intuition about the advantages of multiplexing interconnection networks, especially in cases where communications exhibit strong locality properties.