SLiT (strongly connected light-trail) for WDM rings

Abstract

Light-trail as a candidate for dynamic provisioning and sub-wavelength grooming has been investigated before. A light-trail is an example of an intelligent unidirectional wavelength bus. In this article, we extend the conceptual advantages of light-trails to a bidirectional wavelength bus, which we call as SLiT or strongly connected light-trails. We investigate and propose new node architecture for demonstration of SLiTs in a WDM ring network. To enable communication in a SLiT network we propose a stable and convergent protocol for dynamic bandwidth arbitration as well as for governing the virtual topology. We compare the performance of SLiT networks with light-trail network and other contemporary solutions through a simulations study