Two simple and high performance multichannel distributed queue dual bus (MDQDB) protocols based on the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network technology are proposed, and the network architecture and operations are presented. To be suited for a high speed network, they inherit the advantages of the DQDB protocol such as node simplicity, network flexibility and distributed operations of individual nodes. The network capacity can also be greatly increased with marginal increase of node complexity. Simulation has been done to estimate the performances such as throughput and average access delays for individual nodes. The influence of the bandwidth balancing mechanism on the two protocols is considered at medium, high, and overload conditions. We also investigate the fairness characteristics in asymptotic conditions for various initial states.