PROTOCOLS FOR VERY HIGH SPEED OPTICAL FIBER PASSIVE STAR LANS.

The interconnection of many high-speed bursty traffic users via an optical passive star-coupler is considered. Users can time their lasers over a range of wavelengths, thus resulting in a wavelength-division multiplexed communication. The total number of wavelengths over which user tunability exists could be much smaller than the number of users. Therefore, some form of random access sharing and packet switching may be necessary. Several protocols that require each user to have a tunable receiver are proposed. It is shown that in typical applications an average throughput of up to 0. 95 can be achieved at a reasonable average delay using one of these protocols. Benchmark examples are presented for an optical local area network with a total throughput of 100 Gb/s in which every user has access to a 1-Gb/s data rate and the network can support over 100 users.