Traffic Control on Optical TDMA LANs/MANs

In order to urge an optical TDMA network to be recommended as a LAN/MAN (local area network/ metropolitan area network) protocol, traffic-control approaches capable of improving performance on optical TDMA networks must be developed. This paper explores how to apply the unused bandwidth to enhance the performance of a middle-load TDMA network. The tight and loose traffic-control approaches are used to explore how to improve performance. The loose traffic-control approach (the LTC) permits nodes to access bandwidth which is larger than nodal traffic. But the transmissible traffic of nodes with the tight traffic-control approach (the TTC) is equal to nodal traffic. The difference between the accessible bandwidth and nodal traffic in the LTC is called the added bandwidth of nodes. The average waiting time of TDMA nodes (the waiting mean) is analyzed to obtain the upper and lower bounds of the LTC waiting means. Both bounds and the simulative waiting means caused by the LTC will be contrasted to explore the effect of added bandwidth on network performance. According to the exploration, two effects are realized. One is that the efficacy of performance improving is relative to the transmitted traffic of nodes. The smaller the transmitted traffic of a node, the larger the improving efficacy of the node. The other is that the performance improved by added bandwidth can not be enhanced without restraint even if the added bandwidth is infinite.