Crosstalk-free Conjugate Networks for Optical Multicast Switching

High-speed photonic switching networks can switch optical signals at the rate of several terabits per second. However, they suffer from an intrinsic crosstalk problem when two optical signals cross at the same switch element. To avoid crosstalk, active connections must be node-disjoint in the switching network. In this paper, we propose a sequence of decomposition and merge operations, called conjugate transformation, performed on each switch element to tackle this problem. The network resulting from this transformation is called conjugate network. By using the numbering-schemes of networks, we prove that if the route assignments in the original network are link-disjoint, their corresponding ones in the conjugate network would be node-disjoint. Thus, traditional nonblocking switching networks can be transformed into crosstalk-free optical switches in a routine manner. Furthermore, we show that crosstalk-free multicast switches can also be obtained from existing nonblocking multicast switches via the same conjugate transformation.Comment: 10 page

A communication model of broadcast in wormhole-routed networks on-chip

This paper presents a novel analytical model to compute communication latency of broadcast as the most fundamental collective communication operation. The novelty of the model lies in its ability to predict the broadcast communication latency in wormhole-routed architectures employing asynchronous multi-port routers scheme. The model is applied to the Quarc NoC and its validity is verified by comparing the model predictions against the results obtained from a discrete-event simulator developed using OMNET++

Evaluating the communications capabilities of the generalized hypercube interconnection network

This thesis presents results of evaluating the communications capabilities of the generalized hypercube interconnection network. The generalized hypercube has outstanding topological properties, but it has not been implemented in a large scale because of its very high wiring complexity. For this reason, this network has not been studied extensively in the past. However, recent and expected technological advancements will soon render this network viable for massively parallel systems. We first present implementations of randomized many-to-all broadcasting and multicasting on generalized hypercubes, using as the basis the one-to-all broadcast algorithm presented in [3]. We test the proposed implementations under realistic communication traffic patterns and message generations, for the all-port model of communication. Our results show that the size of the intermediate message buffers has a significant effect on the total communication time, and this effect becomes very dramatic for large systems with large numbers of dimensions. We also propose a modification of this multicast algorithm that applies congestion control to improve its performance. The results illustrate a significant improvement in the total execution time and a reduction in the number of message contentions, and also prove that the generalized hypercube is a very versatile interconnection network

A performance model of communication in the quarc NoC

Networks on-chip (NoC) emerged as a promising communication medium for future MPSoC development. To serve this purpose, the NoCs have to be able to efficiently exchange all types of traffic including the collective communications at a reasonable cost. The Quarc NoC is introduced as a NOC which is highly efficient in performing collective communication operations such as broadcast and multicast. This paper presents an introduction to the Quarc scheme and an analytical model to compute the average message latency in the architecture. To validate the model we compare the model latency prediction against the results obtained from discrete-event simulations

Low Cost Quality of Service Multicast Routing in High Speed Networks

Many of the services envisaged for high speed networks, such as B-ISDN/ATM, will support real-time applications with large numbers of users. Examples of these types of application range from those used by closed groups, such as private video meetings or conferences, where all participants must be known to the sender, to applications used by open groups, such as video lectures, where partcipants need not be known by the sender. These types of application will require high volumes of network resources in addition to the real-time delay constraints on data delivery. For these reasons, several multicast routing heuristics have been proposed to support both interactive and distribution multimedia services, in high speed networks. The objective of such heuristics is to minimise the multicast tree cost while maintaining a real-time bound on delay. Previous evaluation work has compared the relative average performance of some of these heuristics and concludes that they are generally efficient, although some perform better for small multicast groups and others perform better for larger groups. Firstly, we present a detailed analysis and evaluation of some of these heuristics which illustrates that in some situations their average performance is reversed; a heuristic that in general produces efficient solutions for small multicasts may sometimes produce a more efficient solution for a particular large multicast, in a specific network. Also, in a limited number of cases using Dijkstra's algorithm produces the best result. We conclude that the efficiency of a heuristic solution depends on the topology of both the network and the multicast, and that it is difficult to predict. Because of this unpredictability we propose the integration of two heuristics with Dijkstra's shortest path tree algorithm to produce a hybrid that consistently generates efficient multicast solutions for all possible multicast groups in any network. These heuristics are based on Dijkstra's algorithm which maintains acceptable time complexity for the hybrid, and they rarely produce inefficient solutions for the same network/multicast. The resulting performance attained is generally good and in the rare worst cases is that of the shortest path tree. The performance of our hybrid is supported by our evaluation results. Secondly, we examine the stability of multicast trees where multicast group membership is dynamic. We conclude that, in general, the more efficient the solution of a heuristic is, the less stable the multicast tree will be as multicast group membership changes. For this reason, while the hybrid solution we propose might be suitable for use with closed user group multicasts, which are likely to be stable, we need a different approach for open user group multicasting, where group membership may be highly volatile. We propose an extension to an existing heuristic that ensures multicast tree stability where multicast group membership is dynamic. Although this extension decreases the efficiency of the heuristics solutions, its performance is significantly better than that of the worst case, a shortest path tree. Finally, we consider how we might apply the hybrid and the extended heuristic in current and future multicast routing protocols for the Internet and for ATM Networks.

Electronic and photonic switching in the atm era

Broadband networks require high-capacity switches in order to properly manage large amounts of traffic fluxes. Electronic and photonic technologies are being used to achieve this objective both allowing different multiplexing and switching techniques. Focusing on the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), the inherent different characteristics of electronics and photonics makes different architectures feasible. In this paper, different switching structures are described, several ATM switching architectures which have been recently implemented are presented and the implementation characteristics discussed. Three diverse points of view are given from the electronic research, the photonic research and the commercial switches. Although all the architectures where successfully tested, they should also follow different market requirements in order to be commercialised. The characteristics are presented and the architectures projected over them to evaluate their commercial capabilities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Multicasting in WDM Single-Hop Local Lightwave Networks

In modem networks, the demand for bandwidth and high quality of service (QoS) requires the efficient utilisation of network resources such as transmitters, receivers and channel bandwidth. One method for conserving these resources is to employ efficient implementations of multicasting wherever possible. Using multicasting, a source sending a message to multiple destinations may schedule a single transmission which can then be broadcasted to multiple destinations or forwarded from one destination to another, thus conserving the source transmitter usage and channel bandwidth. This thesis investigates the behaviour of single-hop WDM optical networks when they carry multicast traffic. Each station in the network has a fixed-wavelength transceiver and is set to operate on its own unique wavelength as a control channel. Each station also has a tuneable wavelength transceiver in order to transmit or receive signals to or from all the other stations. A transmission on each channel is broadcasted by a star coupler to all nodes. Multicasting in single-hop WDM networks has been studied with different protocols. This thesis studies the multicasting performance adopting receiver collision avoidance (RCA) protocol as a multicasting protocol. This study takes into consideration the effect of the tuneable transceiver tuning time which is the time required to switch from one wavelength to another, and the propagation time required by a packet to propagate from one node to another. The strategy in RCA protocol is that nodes request transmission time by sending a control packet at the head of their queues. Upon receipt of this information all nodes run a deterministic distributed algorithm to schedule the transmission of the multicast packet. With the control information, nodes determine the earliest time at which all the members of the multicast group can receive the packet and the earliest time at which it can be transmitted. If a node belongs to the multicast group addressed in the control packet, its receiver must become idle until all nodes in the group have tuned to the appropriate wavelength to receive the packet. This problem leads to poor transmission and consequently low channel utilisation. However, throughput degradation due to receiver conflicts decreases as the multicast size increases. This is because for a given number of channels, the likelihood of a receiver being idle decreases as the number of intended recipients per transmission increases. The number of wavelengths available in a WDM network continues to be a major constraint. Thus in order to support a large number of end users, such networks must use and reuse wavelengths efficiently. This thesis also examines the number of wavelengths needed to support multicasting in single-hop optical networks

Multimedia Teleservices Modelled with the OSI Application Layer Structure

This paper looks into the communications capabilities that are required by distributed multimedia applications to achieve relation preserving information exchange. These capabilities are derived by analyzing the notion of information exchange and are embodied in communications functionalities. To emphasize the importance of the users' view, a top-down approach is applied. The (revised) OSI Application Layer Structure (OSI-ALS) is used to model the communications functionalities and to develop an architecture for composition of multimedia services with these functionalities. This work may therefore be considered an exercise to evaluate the suitability of OSI-ALS for composition of multimedia teleservices

MorphIC: A 65-nm 738k-Synapse/mm2^2 Quad-Core Binary-Weight Digital Neuromorphic Processor with Stochastic Spike-Driven Online Learning

Recent trends in the field of neural network accelerators investigate weight quantization as a means to increase the resource- and power-efficiency of hardware devices. As full on-chip weight storage is necessary to avoid the high energy cost of off-chip memory accesses, memory reduction requirements for weight storage pushed toward the use of binary weights, which were demonstrated to have a limited accuracy reduction on many applications when quantization-aware training techniques are used. In parallel, spiking neural network (SNN) architectures are explored to further reduce power when processing sparse event-based data streams, while on-chip spike-based online learning appears as a key feature for applications constrained in power and resources during the training phase. However, designing power- and area-efficient spiking neural networks still requires the development of specific techniques in order to leverage on-chip online learning on binary weights without compromising the synapse density. In this work, we demonstrate MorphIC, a quad-core binary-weight digital neuromorphic processor embedding a stochastic version of the spike-driven synaptic plasticity (S-SDSP) learning rule and a hierarchical routing fabric for large-scale chip interconnection. The MorphIC SNN processor embeds a total of 2k leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons and more than two million plastic synapses for an active silicon area of 2.86mm$^2$ in 65nm CMOS, achieving a high density of 738k synapses/mm$^2$. MorphIC demonstrates an order-of-magnitude improvement in the area-accuracy tradeoff on the MNIST classification task compared to previously-proposed SNNs, while having no penalty in the energy-accuracy tradeoff.Comment: This document is the paper as accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems journal (2019), the fully-edited paper is available at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/876400