Does Time-Division Multiplexing Close the Gap between Memory and Optical Communication Speeds?

Optical interconnection networks have the potential of transmitting data much faster than the speed at which this data can be generated at the transmitting nodes or consumed at the receiving nodes. Even when the communication protocols are simpliied and most of the protocol signaling at the end nodes is done in hardware, the data cannot be processed at the end nodes at a rate faster than the rate of memory operations. We study the eeect of multiplexing the network on both its throughput and latency for diierent ratios of memory to link transmission speeds. We found that multiplexing reduces the impact of the gap between data transmission and data generation/consumption speeds.