Circuits over HORNET (CoHo) - guaranteed bit rates over a packet-based metro network

HORNET is a tunable transmitter fixed receiver metro ring network, designed for efficient packet transport. By extending the MAC protocol to include a reservation mechanism, the packet based infrastructure is enhanced to support fixed bit rate circuits. We propose several reservation mechanisms and select one of the mechanisms to simulate and demonstrate experimentally. Our reservation scheme can setup fine granularity circuits, on the order of one to a few Mb/s, and setup and teardown times on the order of the ring propagation delay. The scheme is fully distributed and coupled with HORNET´s wavelength sharing architecture allows simultaneous, point-to-point circuits between any and all network nodes.