Channel sharing in WDM local optical networks

A local lightwave network can be constructed by employing two-way fibers to connect nodes in a passive-star physical topology, and the available optical bandwidth may be effectively accessed by the nodal transmitters and receivers at electronic rates using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). The number of channels in a WDM network is technology-limited and is usually less than the number of nodes in the network. Under this limitation, we consider a general method of channel sharing in multi-hop networks. Sharing is achieved through time division multiplexing. We provide new numerical results on the performance of shared-channel multi-hop networks. These results give us new insights into channel sharing. The analysis enables the study of the effects of two important parameters governing the performance of such networks, namely, propagation delay and number of channels. Our analysis leads us to a counter-intuitive result: it is sometimes better to have fewer channels than a larger number of channels.