Efficient scheduling of nonuniform packet traffic in a WDM/TDM local lightwave network with arbitrary transceiver tuning latencies

A passive-star-based, broadcast-and-select, local lightwave network which can support a limited number of WDM channels (on the order of ten), but serve a much larger number of nodes (a few tens or hundreds), is considered. Each node is equipped with one tunable transmitter and one fixed receiver, and each WDM channel is operated in a TDM fashion for carrying packet traffic. Bandwidth is allocated to the node pairs when traffic flow between them is non-uniform, while also accommodating transceiver tuning latency. Our approach exploits well-known results from scheduling theory to create efficient transmission schedules.