Multimedia Wavelength Division Multiple Access (M-WDMA) specially designed to accommodate multimedia traffic is a well-known media access control (MAC) protocol. This paper extensively analyzes the throughput of M-WDMA. Specifically, this analysis considers a wide range of network conditions including varying traffic loads, probabilistic occupancy of time segment, various traffic distribution patterns (TDPs) and channel sharing methods (CSMs) under both symmetric and asymmetric traffic load patterns (TLPs). Thus, the analytic behavior of M-WDMA can be investigated for designing a WDMA network managing multimedia traffic under practical environments.

This paper proposes the Multimedia Pre-allocation WDMA (MP-WDMA) media access control (MAC) protocol to provide an efficient packet transfer service for metro-wavelength division multiple access (WDMA) networks. MP-WDMA considers three traffic types: constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate 1 (VBR1), and VBR2 traffic for a multimedia service as categorized in Multimedia WDMA (M-WDMA) MAC protocol. MP-WDMA is based on pre-allocation WDMA (P-WDMA), but the three traffic types are simultaneously allocated at one time slot, and one of them is selected through low bandwidth control signaling. Namely, a station assigns appropriate priority to input traffic, based on proposed traffic priority rules in MP-WDMA in order to determine the type of traffic. Accordingly, MP-WDMA can reduce station complexity as well as the possibility of idle time slot occurrences, compared with M-WDMA. Additionally, we analytically investigate the channel utilization and channel access delay of MP-WDMA and compare them with those of M-WDMA to find a proper MAC protocol for the networks. As a result, MP-WDMA supports maximally 30% higher channel utilization than M-WDMA regardless of channel and traffic conditions. Furthermore, MP-WDMA reduces the channel access delay of the delay-sensitive VBR2 traffic at the cost of increasing the channel access delay of the delay-insensitive VBR1 traffic. In this regard, MP-WDMA is suitable for the networks in terms of station complexity, channel utilization, and the channel access delay for VBR2 traffic.

A new load balanced channel sharing method (CSM), namely Heuristic Traffic Load Balanced (HTLB) CSM, is proposed for metro-wavelength division multiple access (WDMA) networks. In particular, HTLB CSM is designed to be effective for pre-allocation based medium access control (MAC) protocols by balancing traffic loads corresponding to pre-assigned destinations per time slot. As a result, HTLB CSM is shown to provide lower time complexity than the well-known sub-optimal load balanced CSM, MULTIFIT CSM. Furthermore, the Jain Index of the HTLB CSM is shown to be higher and more consistent than the MULTIFIT CSM and other pre-fixed CSMs under diverse traffic conditions.