Gigabits-per-second optical interconnection networks: fault-tolerance with and without optical amplifiers

This paper quantifies the power budget concerns with respect to the number of consecutive faults that must be tolerated before a network can fail. In particular, it is shown that multiple consecutive failures may have a serious adverse effect on the speed of gigabit optical networks. Results indicate that, with 20 nodes using simple direct-detection, only passive star networks can operate at Gb/s in the event of multiple consecutive faults. Use of optical preamplifiers is shown to remedy this shortcoming substantially: even with 3 consecutive node failures, optical networks with passive star couplers or single couplers can achieve Gb/s transmission speed for a node spacing of up to 2.3 km