The sub-channeled LightRing for bandwidth efficient storage area networks

Storage area networks (SAN) are important components of today´s corporate networks. Two key features of SAN are the ability to provide distributed access to stored files of any size in a timely manner, and to use network bandwidth efficiently. To achieve these goals, the paper proposes a novel bandwidth reservation scheme for the LightRing - a recently proposed all-optical WDM ring with distributed multi-token access control. For each file transfer, the proposed scheme reserves a bandwidth that: (1) is proportional to the file size; and (2) takes into account the ring latency. The file is then transmitted using one or more optical bursts. As shown in the paper, the proposed reservation scheme achieves both of the goals, i.e., a good utilization of the ring bandwidth and fast file transfer time under a variety of file sizes.