POPSMAC: a medium access protocol for packet-switched passive optical networks using WDMA

A simple medium access protocol, POPSMAC, based on using both tunable transmitter and tunable receiver is proposed and analyzed in this paper. The feasibility and architectures of using this protocol to establish a passive optical packet switched metropolitan/wide area network (MAN/WAN) are also investigated. In POPSMAC, each transmission consists of a small header packet over the signaling wavelength of the destination receiver, and a data packet over the distinct wavelength of the transmitter. The receiver is tuned to the transmitter wavelength after successful received the header packet and knowing there is an incoming data packet. Both connection-oriented and datagram traffic can be supported by this protocol. Performance study shows that the maximum average throughput of each transmitter or receiver approaches 50% with small header packet size (as compared to the data packet). This performance is achieved without requiring network synchronization and is thus suitable to MAN/WAN applications in which network synchronization is difficult.