Fully Distributed Work-Conserving MAC Protocols for Opportunistic Optical Hyperchannels

Abstract

Light-trail is proposed as a candidate to carry IP traffic over wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks given its capability of accommodating multi-granularity traffic by time-division multiplexing (TDM). Light-trail's unidirectional shared-media multicast nature makes it hard to implement distributed access control and restricts that at most one packet transmission can take place at any time. Recently, opportunistic optical hyperchannel was proposed to improve light-trail by permitting easy distributed access control. In this paper, we propose a set of distributed access control protocols, namely, 1-persistent protocols, for opportunistic optical hyperchannels to maximize the throughput and provide fair service among contending nodes by taking their inherent advantage of adaptive space-division multiplexing (SDM). We also point out a possible generalization of opportunistic optical hyperchannels by removing the restriction of linear structure, and demonstrate possible applications of such a generalization.