A new MAC protocol for slotted light-trail optical networks

A light-trail is a generalization of a lightpath in which intermediate nodes can take part in the time-shared communication along a path. Light-trail has been proposed to support on-demand services including the triple play of voice, video and data on optical networks. Since light-trail is a timesharing media, we require a good medium access control protocol to improve the quality of these services. Since the generation of service packets with low priority is more than the generation of services packets with high priority, in our proposed method we consider the problem of scheduling at high rate traffic. In this paper, a MAC protocol for light-trail has been proposed, called Service Priority Management (SPM), to design a scheduling algorithm in which services with more priority are serviced before the other service with less priority. The results obtained from our simulations show that packet loss rate and delay in the whole network is reduced.