A scalable and collision-free MAC protocol for all optical ring networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a collision free MAC protocol for an all-opticalWDMring network where packets remain in optical domain from source to destination. The protocol prevents the contention for shared data-channels and the destination by sharing global status information among the nodes. The proposed protocol which we call reserve transmit release (RTR) is based on a reservation scheme and requires no synchronization among the nodes. The node architecture in this scheme uses a tunable transceiver and, thus, makes the scheme scalable. We study the performance of the algorithm by network simulation. We consider both the Poisson and Pareto distributions for modeling the traffic. We present results for both the models and compare. It is observed that the delay is much higher for bursty traffic and the performance degrades gracefully with increase in nodes as well as the traffic.