Distributed control for a high speed optical customer premises network

In this paper the development of a distributed control system for a wavelength and time-division multiplexed optical Customer Premises Network (CFN) is described. On the one side the constraints posed by the physical characteristics of the passive optical star network have been taken into account. On the other side the requirements arising from the applications are met. A third boundary condition is set by the ongoing international standardization of the B-ISDN. Means to cope with these boundary conditions are presented resulting in the design of a distributed equal peer control system which acts towards its environment as a B-ISDN NT2. The control system is based on the DSS1 protocol. It comprises the lower three OSI layers. The software has been specified in SDL. An outband control channel, based on fixed length cells is chosen. Quick channel setup and release times can be realized. The protocol provides the possibilities of logical addressing, user-user data transfer, privileges and bearer connection linking. With additional hardware, data channels with various bitrates can be switched, varying from 2.24 Mb/s up to the STM/sub 16/ payload capacity (2.4 Gb/s). The control system will be used in a demonstration CPN, which will be realized in 1991 as part of RACE project R1036. The initial application will be a television production environment, but the protocol is flexible enough to support a wide range of applications.