Optimization of token holding times in split light trail networks

As a new optical WDM network architecture that can be built with currently available devices and can achieve bandwidth allocation with granularity finer than a wavelength, a light trail architecture attracts attention. Because a light trail is a shared medium, we need a medium access control (MAC) protocol to avoid collisions. Although MAC protocols using token passing can avoid collisions, bandwidths of links that locate upstream of the token holding node are kept idle. In this paper, we first propose a dynamic light trail splitting method in order to increase throughput of a light trail by using those idle bandwidths. Our method splits a trail into the upstream trail and the downstream trail at the token holding node and independent data transmissions on the two trails are permitted. As a result, we expect that the split trail architecture achieves higher maximum throughput than the original non-split trail architecture. The degree of throughput improvement by the split trail architecture depends on how appropriately we set upstream and downstream token holding times of every transmission node. Thus, we formulate a problem to decide the token holding times as a nonlinear programming problem, derive the maximum throughput of the split trail architecture by solving the problem using NUOPT solver, and investigate the degree of improvement compared to the original architecture. According to numerical examples, the split trail architecture achieves 1) almost the same maximum throughput as the original one for its unfavorite traffic pattern where every transmission node sends data to the terminating node of the trail only, 2) about 1.6 times as high maximum throughput for a uniform traffic pattern where every node-pair requests the same traffic volume, and 3) about 1.9 time as high maximum throughput for its favorite traffic pattern where every transmission node sends data to its adjacent downstream node only.