MultiS-Net: A high-capacity, packet-switched, multichannel, single-hop architecture and protocol for a local lightwave network

Abstract

A variety of multichannel single-hop network architectures and protocols have recently been proposed to exploit the vast capacity of fiber-optics which can well exceed the maximum electronic speed limit. Our MultiS-Net proposal is a new multichannel, single-hop architecture and protocol for a local network which provides packet-switched services to a large number of users connected to a multichannel broadcast medium. A separate channel, called control channel, is established to coordinate data packet transmissions on the other channels (called data channels). To allow low network interfacing costs, each node.in MultiS-Net is only equipped with a single tunable transmitter and a single tunable receiver, both of which are responsible for data channel access as well as control channel access. Without a separate transmitter and a separate receiver dedicated to the control channel, a node cannot have global knowledge of the network status all the time. Hence, global reservation is infeasible here, and all previously proposed schemes with the same low-cost network interface as in MultiS-Net fail to achieve a system throughput as high as those achieved by global-reservation schemes. MultiS-Net successfully incorporates a simple medium access mechanism, which can also achieve high system throughput. In addition, MultiS-Net can accommodate a variable number of nodes as well as time-varying load; typically, however, the number of nodes may be much larger than the number of available data channels. We analyze the performance of MultiS-Net by first constructing a multidimensional Markov chain. Then, the equilibrium point analysis (EPA) technique is adopted to obtain the average data packet delay and system throughput, which are verified by simulation. Numerical results from both the analytical model and simulations are presented, and the impact of various parameters on the system performance is discussed. Nearly-full utilization of total data channel bandwidth can be achieved under proper configurations of system parameters.