The receiver collision avoidance (RCA) protocol for a single-hop WDM lightwave network

A single-hop wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-based local lightwave network employing a passive star topology is considered. The system consists of a single control and a number of data channels. Each station is equipped with a transmitter and a receiver, both of which are tunable over all the channels. Nodes employ the control channel to arbitrate their access to the data channels. Two random-access protocols, improved slotted-ALOHA/ALOHA (ISAA) and slotted-ALOHA/N-switch (SANS), were introduced for such a system by N. Mehravari (1990). A new protocol called the receiver collision avoidance (RCA) protocol is presented and analyzed. The RCA protocol is based on the same network architecture as the ISAA and the SANS protocols, but nonzero channel propagation delay and nonzero transceiver tuning time are used. The RCA protocol is capable of detecting and avoiding receiver collisions, and, by the deterministic channel assignment policy, it can avoid data channel collisions. It has better throughout performance than the ISAA protocol, and its throughput is very close to the ideal results obtained under the SANS protocols with a reasonable choice of network parameters