MAC protocol with delay-aware adaptive round time for split light-trail

Light-trail (LT) has been considered as an attractive solution for optical networks to support emerging services such as video-on-demand, pseudo-wires, and data-centers. The media access control (MAC) protocol is essential for LT networks because LT is a shared-medium. Recently, in order to enhance the throughput, a regular LT can be split into several sub-LTs at the split nodes where traffic undergoes optical-electronic-optical conversation. To deal with the split LT, a novel MAC protocol named Delay-aware adaptive round time for split LT (DAARTS) is developed on the basis of DAART MAC protocol and the schemes of splitting LT. To estimate the performance of the developed MAC protocol, ART, DAART and DAARTS protocols are simulated and compared in the scenarios of three different traffic patterns. Simulation results show that, for traffic 1 and traffic 2, DAARTS has stable throughput performance and can obtain almost 40.83% and 106.64% throughput improvement compared with DAART, respectively. In other words, DAARTS can further enhance the throughput of LT networks.