An efficient and fair probabilistic scheduling protocol for multiple-channel lightwave networks

The authors study an efficient and fair access scheme by which a number of parallel channels can be shared among a number of nodes. The network consists of N nodes and W parallel channels. All the channels are slotted and synchronized and the slot length equals the packet transmission time. Since high-speed interfaces are expensive and since optical signal strength reduces with the number of taps, only a small number of transmitters and receivers are used. Specifically, each node is equipped with a tunable transmitter which can be tuned to any of the W channels, a fixed receiver which can receive from a preassigned channel, and a tunable sensor. A probabilistic scheduling strategy is employed to allocate the total bandwidth of W parallel channels among all the nodes in an efficient and fair manner. Analytical models are developed to obtain the probabilistic scheduling parameters for various fairness criteria