A Distributed Asynchronous Transmission Access Strategy for Optical Single-Hop LANs: An Analytical Performance Study

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an optical passive network architecture suitable for wavelength division multiplexing local area networks (LANs) which use a separate control wavelength. The data wavelengths are organized into several sets, while the access rights over them are distributedly determined aiming to totally expunge the packets collisions on the wavelengths and at destination. The proposed access algorithm pertains to the asynchronous transmission schemes. Thus, it is simple enough since it does not require any synchronization among the stations, providing high efficiency especially under high data rates (100 Gbps and beyond). The performance is evaluated through exhaustive analysis, whilst closed mathematical formulas provide the performance measures. The comparative study proves that the proposed wavelengths organization into sets strategy along with the access scheme significantly improves the performance. Especially, the throughput improvement is proven to be higher as the number of sets increases, and more than 100% even by organizing the wavelengths into only two sets, for diverse numbers of data wavelengths, data wavelengths sets and data packets size. Finally, the proposed study could be applied to optical passive single-hop LANs such as intra-rack data center networks or local institutional or enterprise networks.