Proportionally Fair Buffer Allocation in Optical Chip Multiprocessors

Advances in CMOS-compatible photonic elements have made it plausible to exploit nanophotonic communication to overcome the limitations of traditional NoCs. In this paper, we consider buffer management as a resource allocation which can be cast as a convex optimization problem. Using this framework enables us to devise a token-based optimal buffer management algorithm in optical on-chip architecture that can address fairness issues, as well. The optimal buffer allocation algorithm can be implemented by a centralized controller that is supposed to send processor elements via a simple auxiliary embedded core. Simulation results confirm that the buffer allocation algorithm manages buffer space in a fair fashion as compared to simple naive schemes.