Affiliations: Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2H1, [email protected] | Lockheed Research Laboratory, 0/9150 B/251, 3251 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA, [email protected]
Note: [] Supported in part by NSERC Grant No. OGP9183.
Note: [] Supported in part by Lockheed Internal Research Funding and NASA contract NAS2-13223.
Abstract: We introduce MNA (Multigrid Network Architecture) – a networking concept aimed at applications calling for very high transmission rates (of the order of gigabits per second). An MNA network is a collection of photonic switches linked by optical channels. A switch is responsible for relaying incoming packets along the best available routes to their destinations. Packets that cannot be relayed optimally are deflected, i.e., relayed along suboptimal paths. The technology for building MNA switches has been developed in Lockheed Palo Alto Research Lab, [20]-[22]. In this paper, we discuss the logical aspects of MNA, present a model for investigating the performance of MNA in regular topologies, and apply this model to a number of network configurations.
