AN EFFICIENT COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL FOR HIGH-SPEED PACKET-SWITCHED MULTICHANNEL NETWORKS

This paper proposes a new media-access protocol for high-speed packet- switched multichannel networks based on a broadcast topology - for exa mple, optical passive star networks using wavelength-division multiple access. The protocol supports connection-oriented traffic, with or- w ithout bandwidth reservation, as well as datagram traffic in all attem pt to integrate transport-layer functions with the media-access layer. It utilizes the bandwidth efficiently while keeping the processing re quirements low by requiring stations to compute their transmission and reception schedules only at the start and end of each connection. Our analysis shows that we can achieve low blocking probabilities for con nections, as well as high network throughput.