The MaTPi protocol: masking tuning times through pipelining in WDM optical networks

The authors propose MaTPi, a new media-access protocol for the efficient utilization of resources in a local-area optical WDMA network. Most of the earlier work on reservation based media access protocols for single-hop optical networks has assumed the availability of state-of-the-art transmitters and/or receivers which are capable of tuning to the required wavelengths within nanoseconds. Their protocol operates in the region where the tuning times of the end-devices are of the same order of magnitude as the transmission time of a packet. In the basic MaTPi protocol, network throughput is improved by effectively overlapping the tuning duration of a transmitter in a node with the transmitting times of lasers in other nodes. They extend this basic protocol to the mult-MaTPi protocol, where each node has more than one transmitter to further improve the bandwidth efficiency of the network. Preliminary simulation results indicate that this practical protocol is indeed capable of achieving high throughput with low-cost, off-the-shelf components. A number of extensions to this protocol are also discussed