Designing WDM optical interconnects with full connectivity by using limited wavelength conversion

Optical communication, in particular, wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technique, has become a promising networking choice to meet ever-increasing demands on bandwidth from emerging bandwidth-intensive computing/networking applications. A major challenge in designing WDM optical interconnects is how to provide maximum connectivity while keeping minimum hardware cost. The overall hardware cost of a WDM optical interconnect includes not only the cost of switching elements, but also the cost of wavelength conversion. Previous work mainly focused on minimizing hardware cost without taking into consideration the type of wavelength converters used. In this paper, we design WDM optical interconnects with full connectivity by using the low cost limited wavelength converters. We present optimal WDM optical interconnects for both permutation and multicast in single stage and multistage implementations. We also discuss the impact of the relationship between the number of fibers and the number of wavelengths per fiber on the optimal design. As can be seen, the newly designed WDM optical interconnects have minimum hardware cost in terms of the number of crosspoints and wavelength conversion cost.