The effect of receiver collisions in multi-channel optical networks

The authors present analytical and simulation results on receiver collisions for two different random access protocols as applied to slotted-multichannel networks. When there are multiple data channels in the slotted system with time-disjoint control and data slots, more than one packet may be destined to the same receiver in the same slot. When the destination is equipped with only one receiver, it can receive only one packet, ignoring all others. This causes receiver collision of the first type and reduces the corresponding throughput on the data channels. When there is contention on the channels as well as to the destinations, it is found through simulations that the slot-to-slot correlation is reduced very much and, for all practical purposes, an independence assumption can be a very good approximation in these slotted multichannel networks