A survey of multicast communication in optical network-on-chip (Onoc)

Abstract

Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) is an emerging chip-level optical interconnection technology to realise high-performance and power-efficient inter-core communication for many-core processors. For on-chip networks, multicast communication is an important communication pattern, which is not only widely used in parallel computing applications in Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs), but also commonly adopted in emerging areas such as neuromorphic computing. However, the opti-misation of multicast communication in an ONoC is not well studied and there is a significant room to improve the performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the multicast communication in an ONoC, covering the development of both architecture design and networking design as well as our recent research outcomes. Moreover, we propose the design challenges and future research directions for optimis-ing multicast in an ONoC, which can provide guidance and insight for the future researchers and chip developers.