On the performance of adaptive TDMA protocols in WDM passive star networks with fixed transmitters and tunable receivers

An adaptive time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol for WDM passive star networks using fixed transmitters and tunable receivers is presented. The proposed optical adaptive TDMA (OATDMA) protocol is capable of operating efficiently under bursty and correlated traffic. According to the proposed protocol, the stations which are granted permission to transmit at each time slot, are selected by taking into account the network feedback information. In this way, the number of idle slots is minimized and the network performance is significantly improved. Furthermore, although the traffic parameters are unknown and time-variable, the portion of the bandwidth assigned to each station is dynamically adapted to the station's needs.