New MAC protocol for traffic routing in optical networks by exploiting delays in dynamic bandwidth allocation

Abstract

Traditional Medium Access control (MAC) Protocol achieves better performance for the traffic type actually they have been assigned for but inadequate for other traffic types. The prevailing multimedia applications need that the MAC protocol should execute all traffic types unvaryingly. To ensure efficient transmission, an optical network should make use of a MAC protocol to arbitrate access to the shared medium in order to avoid data collisions and at the same time efficiently share the transmission bandwidth among different traffic classes to guarantee the quality of service (QoS). However, the performance of all these schemes is significantly degraded when the round-trip times (RTTs) of the optical network units (ONUs) are dissimilar, due to the large number of gaps in the transmission schedule. Unfortunately, in real networks, RTTs are usually dissimilar. In this paper we propose a new MAC protocol which accommodates a range of multimedia traffic with dissimilar characteristics and QoS demands. The new MAC protocol employs a new algorithm to exploits the RTTs' resemblance and restructures the ONUs service order and an additional algorithm to support the requests that cause the minimum scheduling latency.