A high-capacity, packet-switched, single-hop local lightwave network

A new network architecture, called MultiS-Net, is proposed to provide packet-switched services to a large number of bursty users connected to a multichannel broadcast medium in a local environment. An example physical network would consist of a passive star coupler to which nodes are connected via two-way fibers, and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is used to create multiple, parallel optical channels. A separate channel, called a control channel, is established to coordinate data packet transmissions on the other channels (called data channels). To allow low network interfacing costs, each node in MultiS-Net is only equipped with a single tunable transmitter and a single tunable receiver, both of which are responsible for data channel access as well as control channel access, and both of which are rapidly tunable. MultiS-Net incorporates a simple medium access mechanism, and it can also achieve high system throughput. In addition, MultiS-Net is scalable, i.e. it can accommodate a variable number of nodes as well as time-varying load