Performance and design evaluation of WDM stars

A performance tool for evaluating the design of a wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) passive star is provided. The design parameters that determine the system performance are the number of wavelengths in the system, the number of receivers per node, the wavelength allocation per receiver, the transmitter tunability range, and the node buffer size. An exact analysis becomes prohibitively complex for even moderately sized systems. Therefore, an efficient approximate analysis with drastically reduced computational complexity is presented, incorporating all of the above design parameters, in addition to the channel access protocol and the nonhomogeneous traffic patterns of high-bandwidth networks. The approach produces very accurate results and can help in selecting the most cost-effective system design for given performance requirements