On the Exploration of a Low-Power Photonic Network Architecture

Abstract

The photonic on-chip network is an emerging technology that can provide low power and high bandwidth. However, photonic devices such as laser sources, resonators, and waveguides have high static power consumption, reducing the energy efficiency of the system. This article proposes a low-power optical network architecture. First, a dynamic network resource supply strategy is designed, and the optical network resources are adjusted according to the runtime traffic characteristics. Second, by leveraging power-efficient routers, our network architecture minimizes power used for compensating optical signal loss. Finally, an adaptive optical routing mechanism is designed to offer the lowest latency and power by utilizing existing network resources. The experimental results show that, compared to the existing scheme, our proposed architecture can save 51 percent power consumption and 60 percent energy consumption in the PARSEC and SPLASH-2 benchmark tests.