Fairness Issues in Bus-Based Optical Access Networks

Packet-based optical access ring is becoming a promising solution in metropolitan networks. Its performance depends mainly on how optical resource sharing takes place among the different competing access nodes. This network architecture has mostly been explored with regard to synchronous transmission, i.e., slotted wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) ring. However, in this paper, we focus on the performance of asynchronous transmission-based networks with variable packet sizes. Analytical models are presented in an attempt to provide explicit formulas that express the mean access delay of each node of the bus-based optical access network. We prove that in such a network, fairness problems are likely to arise between upstream and downstream nodes sharing a common data channel. Furthermore, we show that sharing the channel's available bandwidth fairly but arbitrarily between access nodes, as in slotted WDM rings, does not resolve the fairness problem in asynchronous system. In th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NETWORKING
• Authors: Nizar Bouabdallah, André-Luc Beylot, Guy Pujolle
• Keywords: Access Nodes, NETWORKING 2004, NETWORKING 2007, Optical Access, Packet-based Optical Access