A combinational media access protocol for multicast traffic in single-hop WDM LANs

Multicast transmissions over single-hop WDM LANs have become much more important with several evolving applications. This paper presents a combinational media access protocol which can provide an efficient mechanism for scheduling multicast traffic. The protocol is originated from the unicast-based protocol, which is a pre-allocation-based protocol with tunability at the receiving end. The MSR (multicast slot reservation) reserves slots for the multicast packets and modifies the allocation map derived from the unicast-based protocol. Each node accesses the control channel with the CMS (combinational multicast schedule) algorithm. A multicast packet is verified by the multicast distance in order to determine whether it should be treated as a multicast packet or not. The protocol is simple to implement, and the simulation results suggest that a protocol with the proper multicast distance would result in better performance tradeoffs between unicast traffic and multicast traffic