A clustering-driven medium access control protocol for WDM star networks

Abstract

Channel assignment and nodes’ service order are two key issues that have to be addressed when designing medium access control (MAC) protocols for WDM star networks. Traditional scheduling techniques consider either channel assignment or nodes’ service order issues. Furthermore, they make use of information such as data channels or receivers’ availability, without combining it with senders’ demands. This paper introduces a novel approach to message scheduling algorithms for WDM star networks, which is driven by clustering techniques. The proposed clustering driven-minimum scheduling latency (CD-MSL) scheme combines all the aforementioned information to create groups of similar source nodes on the basis of the destination nodes of their messages, aiming at rearranging nodes’ service order and improving network performance. Extensive simulation results are presented, which indicate that the proposed clustering-driven scheme leads to a significantly higher throughput-delay performance, in comparison to conventional scheduling algorithms.