A robust WDM communication system

An architecture is described which accommodates the difficult physical constraints in a WDM optical network, especially the inevitable wavelength drifts many times the source linewidths, by using an adaptive receiver system. The equally difficult and conflicting requirements of a multi-media, multi-Gb/s network of fixed and low latency, guaranteed bandwidth, and multi-cast have also been met by adapting the DTM protocol to mixed WDM and TDM optical formats.