Efficient QoS support in a slotted multihop WDM metro ring

A novel distributed access protocol for a slotted wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) metro ring employing all-optical packet switching and supporting quality-of-service (QoS) classes is presented and analyzed. Since we assume that there are more nodes than available wavelengths in the network, we obtain a scalable multihop WDM ring as underlying network architecture. By dividing each channel into several time slots and further applying destination release and slot reuse, data packets can be efficiently transmitted and received in a statistically multiplexed manner. In our architecture, each node is equipped with one tunable transmitter and one fixed-tuned receiver. Furthermore, as we generally consider so-called a posteriori access strategies, different packet selection schemes are proposed and compared. An analytical model based on the semi-Markov process methodology is developed to quantify the performance of one of these schemes. As a key element of the protocol, an efficient QoS support access mechanism is proposed and its performance is evaluated. The new QoS control scheme adopts a frame-based slot reservation strategy including connection setup and termination, which only slightly increases the signaling and node processing overhead. Thus, an efficient hybrid protocol combining connectionless and connection-oriented packet transmissions is proposed.