WDM multi-access protocol with optical switch and optical shift register

This paper presents an efficient protocol using an optical line expansion switch and an optical shift register (OSR) to deal with receiver collisions for WDM multi-access communication. The outstanding feature of this protocol is that unlike most previous protocols, it is free from propagation delay. Therefore, it can widely applied in very high speed MAN/WAN. This paper is based on single-hop systems, but similar design is also supported by the middle nodes in multi-hop systems. From the analysis and simulation, the result shows that the protocol achieves a low enough packet loss probability with a proper choice of the parameters for practical applications.