A Simple Highspeed Optical Local Area Network Based on Flooding

This work deals with the problem of interconnecting many highspeed terminal users via an optical local area network (LAN). We take advantage of space division multiplexing (SDM) to provide point-to-point connectivity. As a result, simple light sources and receivers are all that is required. The call setup between a source and a destination is based on the broadcasting of a short address packet or “flooding” which is a simple topology independent routing method and which alleviates the need to have intelligent nodes (cross points). A simple protocol is used to establish an end-to-end path using flooding. Once a source/destination path is established, the actual call starts. The established path is not interrupted by other call setup flooding attempts and/or other calls. Our performance analysis for a simple tree network indicates that a capacity of 66 percent can be achieved at reasonable average blocking delays. The network users can each access full electronics speed and the total throughput of the network is a multiple of full electronics speed. The concurrency is achieved via space division multiplexing.