Abstract—Optical communication are necessary for achieving reliable, fast and flexible communication. Advances in electro-optic technologies have made optical communication a reliable networking choice to meet the increasing demands for high bandwidth and low communication latency of high-performance computing/communication applications. So optical networks gives high performance as well as low latency. Although optical MINs hold great promise and have advantages over their electronic networks, they also hold their own challenges. This paper compares electronic and Optical MINs. The design issues and solution approaches available for optical MINs are also explained and analyzed.

Index Terms—multistage interconnection networks (MIN), optical networks, crosstalk, window methods  

Cite: Rinkle Rani Aggarwal, Lakhwinder Kaur, and Himanshu Aggarwal, "Multistage Interconnection Networks: a Transition from Electronic to Optical," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 142-147, May 2010. doi:10.4304/jetwi.2.2.142-147