A High-Performance Optical Access and Control System for Packet-Switched WDM Metro Ring Networks

In this paper, we present the access and control design of a high-performance optical packet-switched WDM metro ring network (HOPSMAN). HOPSMAN has been designed for networks and nodes to be unconstrained by the number of wavelengths. It includes a handful of nodes that are equipped with fast optical slot erasers making bandwidth reusable and achieving greater bandwidth efficiency. In essence, HOPSMAN incorporates a versatile medium access control (MAC) scheme, which embodies efficient and fair bandwidth allocation in accordance with a quota being exerted probabilistically. The quota is analytically derived with the number of slot-eraser-nodes taken into account. The scheme also employs a new notion of credit to regulate flexible access of remaining bandwidth that is suitable for the metro environment with bursty traffic. With the MAC scheme, HOPSMAN is shown to achieve exceptional throughput, delay, and fairness performance under a wide range of traffic settings via simulation results.