A WDM transmission strategy and node architecture suitable for various sizes IP traffic in ring MANs

In this paper we introduce an innovative transmission strategy suitable for a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) ring Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). The key idea of the proposed WDM Access (WDMA) protocol is the adoption of the asynchronous transmission of variable size IP packets, in conjunction with the employment of an efficient transmission strategy that totally avoids both the data channels and the receiver collisions. In the proposed network architecture, each node uses a tunable transmitter and a set of fixed tuned receivers equal to the number of data wavelengths. The performance measures are extracted by the simulation results of a Poisson traffic model that assumes symmetric access rights among the nodes. Extensive study of the simulation results proves that the studied network reaches high bandwidth efficiency.