Protocols for an optical star interconnect for high speed mesh networks

Optical networks can provide higher throughputs while high speed electronic networks possess the intelligence for network control and management. We present a two level high speed network architecture that combines the throughput advantage of optical networks and the intelligence of electronic processing. One level is a high speed mesh LAN which uses wormhole routing, source routing and hop-by-hop flow control mechanisms with mesh routers (asynchronous pipelined crossbar switches) to provide a high speed electronic network. The second level is an optical star network interconnecting high speed mesh networks distributed across metropolitan area distances. We obtain analytical expressions for the average message (worm) delays for the GTDM (group time division multiplexing) multi-access protocol (which includes as special cases TDM and DAS) for single-hop packet switching in the optical network of such an architecture. We use a two state discrete time Markov chain to model the arrival of messages to the optical network. Results for both uniform traffic and non-uniform traffic are presented. Finally, a modified dynamic allocation scheme is presented for single-hop packet switching which handles the message as a unit rather than sending a message as several fixed sized packets.