An efficient communication protocol for high-speed packet-switched multichannel networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a new media-access protocol for high-speed packet-switched multichannel networks based on a broadcast topology, for example, optical passive star networks using wavelength-division multiple access. The protocol supports connection-oriented traffic with or without bandwidth reservation as well as datagram traffic, in an attempt to integrate transport-layer functions with the media-access layer. It utilizes the bandwidth efficiently while keeping the processing requirements low by requiring stations to compute their transmission and reception schedules only at the start and end of each connection. A simple analysis shows that we can achieve low blocking probabilities for connections, as well as high network throughput.