Scalable High-Speed Protocols for WDM Optical Star Networks

This paper proposes scalable conflict-free media-access protocols for WDM optical passive star networks using shared parallel queueing and wormhole scheduling. Shared parallel queueing is to associate several parallel queues with a data channel, rather than one deep queue (as in DT-WDMA) or N static queues (as in [5] and [6], N is the number of stations). This significantly reduces both the hardware resource requirement and the control signalling demand. Wormhole scheduling is to schedule multiple successive packets which are destined to the same receiver at one time, decreasing the overhead of tuning caused by relatively slow filter and relieving the electronic processing bottleneck. An analytical model is presented and verified through simulation. Numerical results from analysis and simulation indicate that with only 5-6 parallel queues, the protocols are capable of achieving high throughput. Thus the protocols can be scaled up for networks with a large number of stations and could lead to a potential implementation.