Performance comparison between S-ALOHA and R3T protocols for multirate OFFH-CDMA systems in optical packet networks

We discuss two newly proposed multiple-access control (MAC) protocols for multirate optical code-division multiple access (OCDMA) networks. The first protocol is slotted ALOHA/optical fast-frequency-hopping code-division multiple access (S-ALOHA/OFFH-CDMA), and the second is round-robin receiver–transmitter/optical fast-frequency-hopping code-division multiple access (R3/OFFH-CDMA). Our main subject is to exploit the potential of the optical fast-frequency-hopping CDMA using a fiber Bragg grating when jointly used with two different MAC protocols in a link layer as an effective way of integrating multirate traffic. The system throughput and the average packet delay are compared for both systems. It is shown that S-ALOHA is better than R3T when the user’s activity and the offered load are high, whereas R3T is better for smaller values. Both protocols can be competitive in terms of the system throughput, with the advantage going to the R3T protocol at a moderate offered load. However, the R3T protocol suffers a higher delay mainly because of the presence of additional modes. Finally, the overlapped OCDMA system always outperforms the variable processing gain (VPG) OCDMA system regardless of the protocol used. © 2006 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 060.4250, 060.2330, 060.4230.