A new collision-free media access protocol for metro OBS ring networks

This paper proposes a new media access (MAC) protocol for advanced optical burst switching (OBS) in metropolitan area networks (MANs). The considered node architecture has several fixed transmitters and one tunable receiver (FT-TR) for data channels. In general OBS network, data collisions occurred too much. This is because OBS is generally one-way-reservation-based switching scheme. To solve the problem, we propose an advanced MAC protocol supporting variable-size data bursts without any data collision. We named the proposed MAC protocol CFM scheme. CFM scheme uses the global wavelength information to detect data collision prior to transmitting control messages. In terms of simplicity and low delay, this MAC protocol has better performances in compare with LightRing which is another efficient scheme.