All-optical WDM multi-rings with differentiated QoS

This article considers all-optical WDM networks based on a slotted multichannel ring topology, where nodes are equipped with one fixed-wavelength receiver and one wavelength-tunable transmitter; and shows how to design very effective MAC protocols that provide packet-mode transport to multiple information flows with different QoS requirements. As an example, we describe SR3, a collision-free slotted MAC protocol which combines a packet scheduling strategy (called SRR), a fairness control algorithm (called MMR); and a reservation mechanism. SRR achieves an efficient exploitation of the available bandwidth, MMR guarantees fair throughput access to each node, and SR3, by permitting slot reservations, leads to tighter control on access delays, and can thus effectively support traffic classes with different QoS requirements