Protocols for Very High Speed Optical Fiber Local Area Networks Using a Passive Star Topology.

This paper deals with the problem of interconnection of many high speed bursty traffic users via an optical passive star- coupler. Each user can tune its laser over range of wavelengths, thus resulting in a wavelength division multiplexed communication. The total number of wavelengths over which user tunability exists could be much smaller than the number of users. Therefore, some form of random access sharing and packet switching may be necessary. We propose several protocols that require each user to have a tunable receiver. The information on "where" and "when" to tune the laser is confined to a control (set- up) channel that users tune to when in idle mode.