A TDM-based control mechanism with group interleaved control channel for wavelength division multiplexing networks

Various network topologies, such as bus, ring and star, as well as WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) and TDMA (time division multiplexing access) are popular in MAN/LAN. However, TDMA is suitable only for a heavily loaded traffic. On the other hand, the network traffic in these applications such as multimedia, videoconferencing, etc., usually exhibits traffic locality. This type of traffic uses relatively high bandwidth on a continuous basis for a long period of time. As a result, traditional TDMA is no longer appropriate for such traffic because of inefficiency. Consequently, based on the traffic parameters such as locality and loading, an architecture named as rGDBLN (r Group Dual Bus Lightwave Network), which partitions/reconfigures the network into several control groups, is proposed. Furthermore, the interleaved control slot (ICS) equipped with cross-group section (CGS) and non-cross-group section (NCGS) for reducing collisions is also presented. The slot reuse can be easily achieved by using the ICS scheme and the slot utilization of the network is superior to the original network under the specific traffic.