High-speed flooding optical local area network.

The problem of interconnecting many high-speed terminal users via an optical local-area network (LAN) is examined. Advantage is taken of space-division multiplexing 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 on flowing, which is a simple topology-independent routing method that 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. The performance analysis for a simple tree network indicates that a capacity of 66% can be achieved at reasonable average blocking delays. The network users can each access full electronics speed; the total throughput of the network is a multiple of full electronics speed. The concurrency is achieved by space-division multiplexing.