Time-deterministic WDM star network for massively parallel computing in radar systems

In massively parallel computer systems for embedded real-time applications there are normally very high bandwidth demands on the interconnection network. Other important properties are time-deterministic latency and services to guarantee that deadlines are met. In this paper we analyze how these properties vary with the design parameters for a passive optical star network, specifically when used in a massively parallel radar signal processing system. The aggregated bandwidth and computational power of the radar system are approximately 45 Gb/s and 100 GOPS, respectively. The analysis is focused on the medium access control protocol, called TD-TWDMA, for the time and wavelength multiplexed network. It is concluded that the proposed network is very well suited to this kind of signal-processing applications. We also present a new distributed slot-allocation algorithm with real-time properties.