Time slot allocation for real-time messages with negotiable distance constraints

The authors present a time slot allocation scheme to support real-time communications with strict rate requirements and flexible distance constraints. They first devise an algorithm to schedule message streams on a single link. They then extend it to schedule real-time traffic on WDM optical star couplers, where the validation requirements of the device configuration are also taken into consideration in the scheduling algorithm. The results show that by decoupling the rate and distance constraint requirements of the real-time streams, high schedulability can be achieved with a small relative scheduling jitter.