Performance and protocol improvements for very high speed optical fiber local area networks using a passive star topology

Two random-access schemes for a multiuser very-high-speed optical data network based on a star topology are presented and analyzed. The protocols presented do not require any type of carrier sensing, and their performance is independent of a, the normalized propagation time of packets over the optical medium. This property is rather important when dealing with very-high-speed networks which result in high values of a, because the performance of the conventional carrier sensing schemes is poor under such conditions. The protocols outperform the corresponding algorithms of I.M.I. Habbab et al. (1987) for all values of system parameters.