Design and analysis of a hybrid access control to an optical star using WDM

A passive optical star is an ideal shared medium, from both fault tolerant and access synchronization points of view. The communication over an optical star merges to a single point in space and then broadcasts back to all the nodes. This circular symmetry facilitates the solution for two basic distributed synchronization problems, which are presented in this work: (i) the generation of a global event clock for synchronizing the nodes′operation, and (ii) distributed scheduling for accessing the shared passive medium, which is a hybrid (deterministic and random) technique. We present, prove, and analyze this hybrid scheduling algorithm, which is equivalent to a distributed queue, and, therefore, is also algorithmically fair. Furthermore, our solution has two additional properties: destination overflow prevention and destination fairness. The effective solution of these problems can be used for efficiently implementing a local area network based on a passive optical star. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.