Integration of differentiated services with fairness control on a WDM metro ring

Abstract

This study develops a Fair and Efficient Integrated Media Access Control (FEIMAC) protocol, designated FEIMAC, for a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) dual-ring network known as FT 2 -TR 2 . This system is an extended version of the original unidirectional FT-TR ring architecture, in which the nodes are equipped with a fixed-tuned transmitter and a tunable receiver on each ring. FEIMAC is derived from the Fairness Control with Collision Avoidance (FCCA) protocol proposed in a previous study by the current authors (Chang, W.-R. et al.: FCCA: A reversedirection-based MAC protocol suite for WDM Metropolitan Ring Networks, Proc. of IEEE APCC 05, Perth, Australia, October 2005, pp. 946-950). FCCA is a collision-free medium access control (MAC) protocol, which achieves an efficient exploitation of the available bandwidth while guaranteeing each node a fair access to the network resources. In addition to the capabilities described above, FEIMAC employs a framed approach, in which each frame consists of a "real-time subframe" followed by a "best-effort subframe", to support differentiated services of real-time and best-effort traffic streams. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed integrated protocol.