MAC Protocols for Multirate OV-CDMA System in Optical Packet Network: a comparative Approach

In this paper, we compare the performance of two newly proposed MAC protocols for multirate optical CDMA (OCDMA) networks. The first protocol is the S-ALOHA/OFFH-CDMA and the second is the R³T/OFFH-CDMA. The main subject in this proposal is to exploit the potential of the optical fast frequency hopping CDMA using fiber-Bragg grating when jointly used with two different MAC protocols in a link layer as an effective way of integrating multirate traffic. The system throughput and the average packet delay are compared for both systems. It is shown that the S-ALOHA is better than the R³T when the user´s activity and the offered load are high while the R³T is better for smaller values. Both protocols can be competitive in terms of the system throughput with the advantage is for the R³T protocol at moderate offered load. However, the R³T protocol suffers a higher delay mainly because of the presence of additional modes.