Determining optimal light-trail length

Light-trails based solutions have been proposed and demonstrated as a means of traffic grooming and optical multicasting in a LAN/MAN, where multiple nodes use time division multiple access on a unidirectional optical bus. When compared to light paths or having nodes relaying traffic using optical-electronic-optical conversion there are advantages and disadvantages to light-trails in terms of bandwidth, hardware requirements and latency. Given that a light-trail of a specific length has been identified, we develop an approach to increase its capacity utilization. In particular, we show that splitting a longer light-trail in shorter segments results into more effective and efficient utilization of bandwidth. However, we do not believe that splitting a light-trail into segments of lengths one is preferable as it will increase the overall delay.