The receiver collision avoidance (RCA) protocol for a single-hop WDM lightwave network

A multiple access protocol is proposed for a single-hop wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) -based multichannel local lightwave network. The protocol can support a large number of high-speed bursty traffic nodes interconnected via a passive optical star coupler. Each node is equipped with only one transmitter and one receiver, both of which are tunable over all the channels. A single control channel arbitrates access to the other channels, called data channels. A simple mechanism dynamically detects and avoids receiver collisions. Nonzero channel propagation delay and nonzero transceiver tuning times are taken into account, and the system can be readily implemented with current lightwave technology. The protocol allows overlapping of one node´s tuning time with the nodes´ packet transmission time to reduce the performance penalty of large tuning time. The performance of the RCA protocol is analyzed. Numerical results show that the maximum throughput is around 36% of the total data channel capacity and degrades slightly for larger transceiver tuning times. For a typical network, about 20 data channels are needed to support 500 nodes without overloading the system