A trail multi-splitting method for throughput improvement in light trail networks

Light trail networks have been proposed as an extension of lightpath networks in order to enable sub-wavelength bandwidth allocation in WDM networks. The networks need a medium access control (MAC) method to avoid collisions of data transmissions. We have proposed a MAC method which adopts a token-passing mechanism. The method splits one trail into two trails: one upstream trail and one downstream trail and permits independent data transmissions on the trails. However, the method leaves bandwidths of links upstream from the token-holding node idle because the method only splits the original trail into two trails and leaves the upstream trail unsplit. In this paper, we propose a novel token-passing MAC method for further improving trail throughputs. Our proposed method recursively splits the upstream trail, and consequently the original trail can be split into more than two trails. In the proposed method, an appropriate setting of upstream/downstream token-holding times of all nodes is a key factor to successfully accommodate an input traffic. Therefore, we tackle a problem (called a token-holding time decision problem) where we optimize token-holding times of all nodes so that input traffic is successfully accommodated. We formulate the problem as a linear programming model. Numerical examples on maximum effective throughput show that the proposed method is more superior as the ratio of short-hop traffic is higher in input traffic patterns.