A flexible MAC protocol for all-optical WDM metropolitan area networks

In a metropolitan sized high-speed Wavelength Division Multiplexed optical network (WDM MAN), Media ACcess (MAC) protocols can only obtain low delay and high performance when reservation based protocols are used. However, reservation protocols limit the maximum number of network nodes. In existing solutions, this limit is either very tight, or the transmission delay is increased to allow more stations. In this paper, a new MAC protocol called Signal-Reservation-Decoupling (SRD) is proposed. SRD is capable of increasing the number of nodes considerably. Transmission delay is kept low by strictly avoiding signal-retransmissions. SRD is message-aware which faciliates transport of higher-level Protocol Data Units (PDUs) like IP datagrams. Directing subsequent packets of a message without interruption improves throughput when tuning times are not neglected.