Speaker: Prof. Yi Pan
                 Department of Computer Science
                 Georgia State University
                 Atlanta, Georgia.
                 Email: pan@cs.gsu.edu
                 http://www.cs.gsu.edu/pan

Title: Optical Multistage Networks: Challenges and Approaches

Date and Time: Friday, October 17th, 2003 2:30 PM
Place: 145 Coates

Abstract:

Optical networks have been extensively used in wide-area networks and have received much attention in distributed processing community as well. A basic element of optical switching networks is a directional coupler with two inputs and two outputs (also referred to as switching elements). Depending on the control voltage applied to it, an input optical signal is coupled to either of the two outputs, setting the switching element to either the "straight" or the "cross" state. A class of topologies that can be used to construct optical networks is multistage interconnection networks (MINs), which interconnect their inputs and outputs via several stages of switching elements. Although optical MINs hold great promises and have demonstrated advantages over their electronic counterparts, they also introduce new challenges and problems. Due to these new problems, traditional routing algorithms and results for electronic MINs cannot be applied directly to optical MINs. In this talk, we will identify the problems encountered, propose possible approaches to the problems, and report some new results on optical multistage interconnection networks. In particular, permutation capability, various heuristic routing algorithms using AI techniques and their performance on optical banyan and Benes networks will be presented.