On-Fiber Photonic Computing

Abstract

In the 1800s, Charles Babbage envisioned computers as analog devices. However, it was not until 150 years later that a Mechanical Analog Computer was constructed for the US Navy to solve differential equations. With the end of Moore's Law, photonic computing is revitalizing the promise of analog computing by leveraging photons' speed, bandwidth, and energy efficiency for faster, more efficient, and scalable analog computing systems. This paper argues that the networking community should augment pluggable transponders with photonic computing capabilities to enable a backward-compatible solution for in-network computing. We propose on-fiber photonic computing to perform computing operations inside network transponders while the data is in the optical domain. We discuss the components required to enable the seamless integration of computation into the very fabric of optical communication links. We then discuss several use cases of on-fiber photonic computing, including machine learning inference, video encoding, load balancing, and intrusion detection.