Design and performance analysis of a contention-based reservation protocol for a local area optical Internet

In this paper, we propose and analyze a new multiple access protocol for a local area optical Internet based on a wavelength division multiplexing technique which uses a passive star coupler. The proposed contention-based reservation protocol can support variable-length as well as fixed-length messages for transporting Internet packets with one reservation of a minislot at the beginning of a packet transmission. The minislot is used to reserve the data channel on the basis of the slotted ALOHA protocol and the control node ensures subsequent message transmission on the same wavelength. Thus, all messages need not be broken down to many fixed-length packets, and consecutive messages are transmitted through the same wavelength. Moreover, the proposed protocol reduces the collision probability of minislots and improves wavelength utilization. We determine the maximum throughput and verify the results with simulation.