A WAVELENGTH ENCODED MULTICHANNEL OPTICAL BUS FOR LOCAL-AREA NETWORKS

A scalable, high-speed, wavelength encoded multichannel optical bus (W EMCOB) employing the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology is proposed to reduce the link speed requirement, the wiring complexi ty, and the number of optical amplifiers for local area networks. In t his paper, a hierarchical network topology is adopted, in which a dual unidirectional WEMCOB with separate control and data channels compose s the backbone network, and unidirectional tree-based WEMCOB's with ce ntralized arbiters constitute the subnetworks. We perform a feasibilit y study on the implementation of a local area network based on the WEM COB, discuss the related issues, and show that a total transmission ca pacity of several tens of gigabits per second (Gb/s) can be achieved t o serve a large number of broadband users by utilizing today's optoele ctronic technology.