An asymmetric access strategy with propagation delay analysis for bandwidth utilization improvement in WDM networks

The key idea of this study is the adoption of an asymmetric access strategy suitable for a WDM network architecture of passive star topology that uses the Multichannel Control Architecture (MCA). The asymmetric access strategy determines that the MCA exploits a separate control channel for the transmission of free stations, while the remaining control channels are used by the backlogged stations. The exchanged control information over the MCA is utilized to properly assign the data channels among the stations for transmission, improving data channels utilization. In addition, the access scheme effectively exploits the propagation delay latency as an appropriate attribute in order to totally avoid both the data channels collisions and the destination conflicts. Thus, we achieve essential performance improvement and bandwidth utilization enhancement. The proposed access strategy belongs to the synchronous transmission WDMA protocols. An analytic Markovian model for finite population without approximations is developed to derive the performance measures. The effect of receiver collisions is analytically examined. Extensive comparative results are investigated for different network parameters: stations population and MCA channels.