Collisionless Multiple Access Protocols for Wavelength Division Multiplexed Star-Coupled Photonic Networks

This paper introduces a collisionless wavelength division multiple access protocol for a passive star-coupled photonic network that possesses significant performance and flexibility advantages over alternative approaches. This protocol is compared in terms of relative performance and network architecture to the dynamic time-wavelength division multiaccess (DT-WDMA) protocol proposed in [1] through an extensive simulation study. The protocols are control channel based: one of the WDM channels is used to reserve data channel access for data packet transmission. Both protocols achieve access arbitration of the control channel through time-division multiplexing and eliminate the long synchronization delays typical in networks with time-multiplexing employed on the data channels. The proposed approach eliminates the linkage between the number of nodes, channels, and packet length as proposed in [1]. Variable sized data packets in a collisionless environment are supported without utilization degradation. Furthermore, an overlapping mechanism is introduced that relaxes the constraints on the switching times of the optical components by decreasing the performance sensitivity. The performance is compared in terms of network throughput, packet delay, and control and data channel utilization. In particular, this paper examines the performance impact with variations in the number of nodes and data channels, packet generation rate, data packet length, and the optical device switching latencies.