Architecture and protocol of a passive optical packet-switched metropolitan/wide area network using WDMA

The feasibility and architectures of applying wavelength division multiple access (WDMA) techniques to establish a passive optical packet-switched metropolitan/wide area network are investigated. A passive optical network architecture that contains no switching and buffering elements inside the network and can support a multi-gigabit data rate per channel is proposed. In addition, a simple media access protocol based on using both tunable transmitter and tunable receiver is proposed and analyzed. Performance study shows that the maximum average throughput of each transmitter or receiver approaches 50% with small header packet size (as compared to the data packet)