Design of MAC protocols for DWADM-based metropolitan-area optical ring networks

We propose medium-access control protocols in multi-wavelength ring networks where each node is equipped with a DWADM (Dynamic Wavelength Add-Drop Multiplexer) (and a SONET ADM) instead of tunable or fixed transceivers. The property of a DWADM dictates that, at any given time, the input channel wavelength must be the same as the output channel wavelength. The DWADM is an emerging device which could turn out to be very inexpensive, so we investigate how to exploit its usage in a multi-wavelength ring network for dynamic packet transport. Our results show that the proposed protocols can solve the fairness problem inherent in such a system and achieve good performance.