Switching latency overlap techniques for WDM star-coupled media access protocols

The impact of the wavelength-tunable device switching latency on the performance of media access protocols for star-coupled wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) photonic networks is investigated. The effects of a reservation-base protocol (TDMA-C) and two preallocation-based protocols (I-TDMA* and I-SA) are compared. TDMA-C is control-channel based, with one WDM channel allocated to reserve access for data packet transmission on the remaining data channels. I-SA and I-TDMA* are designed for a network where channels are preallocated to the nodes for reception, with each node having a home channel it uses for all data packet receptions. The performance of the protocols is evaluated through discrete-event simulation is terms of network throughput, packet delay, and data channel utilization, with variations in the number of nodes and data channels, packet generation rate, data packet length, optical device switching latencies, and propagation delay.<
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