Two important issues that need to be addressed when designing medium access
control (MAC) protocols for Wavelength Division Multiplexing networks are
message sequencing and channel assignment. Channel assignment addresses the
problem of choosing an appropriate data channel via which a message is tra
nsmitted. This problem has been addressed extensively in the literature. On
the other hand, message sequencing, which addresses the order in which mes
sages are sent, has rarely been addressed. In this paper, we propose a new
reservation-based message scheduling algorithm called RO-EATS that addresse
s both the channel assignment and message sequencing during its scheduling
process. We formulate an analytical model and conduct extensive simulations
to evaluate the performance of this algorithm. We compare the performance
results of a well-known algorithm which only addresses the channel assignme
nt issue with those of our new algorithm. The comparison shows that our new
algorithm gives significant improvement over scheduling algorithms that do
not consider message sequencing. As a result, we anticipate that these res
earch results will lead to new approaches to message scheduling on WDM netw
orks. (C) 1999 published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.