Wavelength-based cell switching in ATM multihop optical networks

An optical multihop network architecture that uses wavelength-based cell-switching and that consists of optically separated passive star couplers interconnected by 2×2 electronic asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches (network interface units) is presented. A fixed assignment TDMA-WDMA scheme provides a means for sharing the passive star couplers´ bandwidth without cell collisions. Adaptive shortest path cell routing exploits the multiplicity of paths in the multihop environment to reduce queuing delay and provide load balancing across all WDMA channels. Analytic models of general network performance are developed and verified by means of computer simulation. The network performance for ShuffleNet configurations is quantitatively studied. The proposed architecture provides for unlimited scalability, both geographically and in the number of users, and is less costly and complex to implement than conventional multihop approaches