Comparative Analysis of Simulators for Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC)

On-chip optical interconnection technology can provide faster transmission speed, greater communication bandwidth and higher energy efficiency, which has been proposed to replace the electrical interconnection architecture. Simulators for optical network-on-chip (ONoC) play an important role in advancing research related with ONoCs. This paper first targets on the analysis of different ONoC architectures, including ring-based, mesh-based, tree-based and multistage network-based topologies. Secondly, we investigate the simulators for ONoC which are categrized into network simulator and system simulator. Thirdly, we simulate the torus-based ONoC in PhoenixSim and analyze insertion loss results in different network sizes. Finally, we compare Graphite and gem5 simulators. Experiments show that Graphite has more advantage in simulation speed under different number of cores, but gem5 has a more comprehensive simulation of computer systems composed of on-chip optical networks. We believe that this study will provide a very useful resource for the ONoC community, especially early-stage ONoC researchers, to gain exposure to the existing ONoC simulation options.