Progress in high-speed TDMA communications

In the future, time division multiple access (TDMA) shared-media optical communications will be necessary to meet the need for high-rate bandwidth-on-demand services. Algorithms designed to manage the network must be simple enough to be executable with a minimal amount of processing available at the optical bit rate. We have developed a frame-based slotted architecture called HLAN (helical local area network). In early work, the HLAN architecture was implemented on a helical ring physical structure, but most recently has been explained using a folded bus implementation. The HLAN architecture may be implemented using all-optical switches as the interface between the high-speed optical bus, and the more sophisticated electronic processors in the user access node. These all-optical switches may be configured to perform address recognition, buffering, clock recovery and rate conversion. We give a brief overview of the HLAN algorithm and present our most recent switching results. In addition, we present our progress to date on the demonstration of a 100 Gb/s all-optical TDMA testbed