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.

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.

A Wavelength Division Multiaccess (WDMA) network with buffer sharing among stations is studied. All stations in the network are connected to a passive optical star coupler and each station has a different fixed wavelength laser for transmitting packets. Each station in the network reports its packet backlog to a scheduler which computes and then broadcasts a transmission schedule to all the stations through a control channel in each time slot. A transmission schedule includes two types of assignments: 1) assign a maximum number of stations for conflict-free transmissions, and 2) assign the relocation of packets from congested stations to uncongested relaying stations through idling transceivers for distributed buffer sharing. The first assignment aims at maximizing throughput and the second assignment aims at minimizing packet loss. Simulation results show that as much as 75% of the buffers can be saved with the use of buffer sharing when 50% of the packets are of the non-sequenced type.