An Efficient Metropolitan WDM Ring Architecture for a Slotted Transmission Technique

In this paper, we present a wavelength division multiplexing multiring metropolitan area network architecture using a separate ring as control channel and a finite number of access nodes. Each access node is equipped with a fixed tuned transmitter and a fixed tuned receiver to exchange control information over the control wavelength. Also, each access node has a tunable transmitter to efficiently exploit all data wavelengths for data transmission. The set of data wavelengths is divided into wavelength bands. This allows a flexible node design with a number of parallel tunable receivers per node, each operating in a specific wavelength band and providing limited tuning time. On the one hand, our network strategy confronts more efficiently the scalability and maintenance problems comparatively with most of the access ring protocols. On the other hand, the proposed access algorithm avoids both the data wavelengths and the receiver collisions, improving even more the network utilization. An analytic model is developed for the performance measures evaluation. Also, we develop another analysis approach using discrete event simulation model based on self-similar statistics. Analysis is accomplished studying various numbers of access nodes, data wavelengths, and buffer size.