A high performance clustering-driven MAC protocol for single-hop lightwave networks

A medium access control (MAC) protocol for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) star networks has to handle two key issues: channel assignment and nodespsila service order. Traditional scheduling techniques define the nodes transmissions and receptions, by considering either channel assignment or nodespsila service order issue. Furthermore, they take into account data channels or receiverspsila availability, but they ignore the similarity between nodespsila demands which affect the scheduling length. In this paper a novel, clustering-driven scheduling approach is introduced. The proposed clustering driven - minimum scheduling latency (CD-MSL) scheme combines all the aforementioned information and creates groups of source nodes which present similar demands on the basis of their message destination nodes. Based on the obtained clusters, CD-MSL improves network performance by rearranging the nodespsila service order. Simulation results indicate that the proposed clustering-driven scheme leads to a significantly higher throughput-delay performance, in comparison to conventional scheduling algorithms.