Simple On-Line Scheduling Algorithms for All-Optical Broadcast-and-Select Networks

This paper considers all-optical broadcast networks providing a number of slotted WDM channels for packet communications. Each network user is equipped with one tunable transmitter and one fixed receiver, so that full connectivity can be achieved by tuning transmitters to the different wavelengths. Tuning times are not negligible with respect to the slot time. A centralized network controller allocates slots in a TDM/WDM frame according to (long-term) bandwidth requests issued by users. Simple on-line transparent scheduling strategies are proposed, which accommodate bandwidth requests when they are received (on-line approach), with the constraint of not affecting existing allocations when a new request is served (transparency). Strategies that attempt to allocate in contiguous slots all the transmissions of each source on one wavelength reduce overheads, are simple, and provide good performance. Even better performance can be achieved, at the cost of a modest complexity increase, when the transparency constraint is not strictly imposed, i.e., when a full re-allocation of existing connections is performed once in a while.