A protocol for WDM star coupler networks

The authors propose a media access protocol for an optical star-coupler network in which the stations are equipped with fixed transmitters and tunable receivers and use wavelength-division multiplexing. The protocol, called the group TDM scheme (GTDM), is a reservation-based scheme in which the nodes are assembled into groups. The nodes within a group communicate with the nodes of other groups using the TDM scheme, but they make reservations using the dynamic allocation scheme (DAS), which has been proposed earlier. GTDM tries to overcome the drawbacks of TDM (unnecessary high delays under low load) and DAS (high signaling costs) by providing a trade-off between packet delay and signaling costs. Analytical and simulation results show that GTDM can achieve good performance with low signaling complexity. It is also shown to perform better than hybrid TDM (HTDM), a hybrid of TDM and DAS, for a given signaling complexity