Access methods for fiber-optic interconnection of LAN´s

This work examines the use of conventional access methods from the point of view of fiber-optic interconnection of local area networks (LANs). It is shown that their characteristics depend on the number of nodes, packet length, and distance between nodes. A statistical analysis is carried out to compute access delay, delay variance, and the number in the buffer, and to analyze the effect of the interconnection network on the LANs. Results show that, with the exception of polling, the network characteristics are not accurately predicted by Poisson models. Compared to ring and bus topologies the star has better power budget characteristics, which are useful for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), but it is more difficult to implement access methods on it. The addition of more wavelengths multiplies the throughput, but has little effect on the total delay