A novel distributed photonic switch

This paper presents a novel distributed shared medium photonic switch applicable to optical broadband local and metropolitan area networks. This switch supports a hierarchical star topology and adopts an hybrid FDM/TDM multiplexing scheme with a total capacity in the 5-20 Gbit/s range. An extension of OSI reference model to optical multi-channel operation is proposed using a new Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and a distributed network management scheme characterized by a semipermanent frequency assignment. Interconnection of several stars in an hierarchical multi-star topology is also discussed.