A Flow-aware MAC Protocol for a Passive Optical Metropolitan Area Network

TL;DR

This paper proposes a flow-aware MAC protocol for passive optical metro networks using TWIN technology, enhancing fairness and performance through a distributed, flow-based bandwidth allocation mechanism.

Contribution

It introduces a novel flow-aware MAC protocol inspired by EPON bandwidth allocation, tailored for TWIN-based passive optical networks, with comprehensive analytical and simulation evaluation.

Findings

High traffic capacity achieved

Low packet latency demonstrated

Effective flow-based bandwidth management

Abstract

The paper introduces an original MAC protocol for a passive optical metropolitan area network using time-domain wavelength interleaved networking (TWIN)% as proposed recently by Bell Labs . Optical channels are shared under the distributed control of destinations using a packet-based polling algorithm. This MAC is inspired more by EPON dynamic bandwidth allocation than the slotted, GPON-like access control generally envisaged for TWIN. Management of source-destination traffic streams is flow-aware with the size of allocated time slices being proportional to the number of active flows. This emulates a network-wide, distributed fair queuing scheduler, bringing the well-known implicit service differentiation and robustness advantages of this mechanism to the metro area network. The paper presents a comprehensive performance evaluation based on analytical modelling supported by simulations. The proposed MAC is shown to have excellent performance in terms of both traffic capacity and packet latency.