<title>Performance analysis of a generalized receiver collision avoidance (RCA) protocol for single-hop WDM local lightwave networks</title>

Abstract

A single-hop wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) based local lightwave network employing a passive star topology is considered. The system consists of a single control channel and a number of data channels. Each station is equipped with a transmitter and a receiver, both of which are tunable over all the channels. Nodes employ the control channel to arbitrate (coordinate) their access to the data channels. The attractiveness of this architecture is its extreme simplicity. We have previously proposed a Receiver Collision Avoidance (RCA) protocol for such a system in which all nodes are equidistant from the passive star. Under the RCA protocol, access to the control channel is provided via a variation of slotted ALOHA, which includes a simple mechanism that can dynamically detect and avoid receiver collisions. The protocol is scalable and can support a large number of bursty nodes with a relatively small number of data channels. In this paper, we consider an extended RCA protocol (E-RCA) to incorporate nonuniform distances, while maintaining all of the protocol's original attractive features. The analytical model for the E-RCA protocol is difficult to formulate; therefore, extensive simulations were conducted under various distance distributions. Results indicate that the E-RCA protocol performs almost as well as the RCA protocol under the same average distance conditions. Also, like the RCA protocol, the E-RCA protocol is simple, based on practical assumptions, and can be readily implemented with current lightwave technology.© (1993) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.