Feature

Free-space WDM Optical Mesh-connected Bus Interconnect

Yao Li, Ting Wang, Satish B. Rao, George Z. Pan, N.J. Adolf W. Lohmann, Tao Jiang, and Jacob Sharony

Have you ever wondered how the above-ground public transportation in a crowded urban area such as New York city is handled? The next time you visit "the Big Apple," note that most of the city buses follow routes along either east-west oriented streets or north-south oriented avenues in Manhattan. By taking three consecutive bus rides (turning corners twice), you can reach any destination in this mesh-structured city. The concept behind this transportation pattern can be found in a communication network, commonly known as the Clos 3-stage network. The mesh-connected bus (MCB) topology is one way of laying out the Clos network in a 2D format. It has been shown that any permutation can be arranged, without experiencing internal blocking, in three global routing steps; permuting along the row buses, then along the column buses, and finally along the row buses.