Source- and Destination-based Wavelength Assignment Approach in Optical Network-on-Chip: Design and Performance

Photonic interconnect can provide ultra-high bandwidth with low power consumption, which makes Optical Network-on-Chips (ONoCs) a promising alternative for the nextgeneration high performance chip multiprocessors. To make better use of the optical interconnect, Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is commonly used to provide high bandwidth and decrease the contention possibility. In this paper, we propose two wavelength assignment methods for Mesh ONoCs: source-based wavelength assignment (SW) and destination-based wavelength assignment (DW). These two lowcomplexity approaches allow us to use a limited number of wavelengths according to the source and destination addresses. We evaluate their performance in simulations, and results show that allocating wavelengths according to the source node outperforms destination-based assignment in terms of latency and throughput. Keywords—WDM; latency; throughput; insertion loss