| Existing networks are becoming increasingly congested as a growing number of users seek access to the vast amount of information available on the Internet. At the same time, emerging multimedia applications, such as video conferencing, interactive television, and video-on-demand are expected to further test the limits of current network infrastructures. There is an immediate need for the development of new, evolutionary high-capacity networks which are capable of supporting these growing bandwidth requirements. Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) is a promising solution for satisfying this bandwidth bottleneck. As WDM deployment becomes widespread, new network architectures and protocols which take advantage of WDM's capabilities will need to be developed. This dissertation investigates network architectures and protocols for WDM networks, with the goals of measuring the performance of existing approaches and of developing new architectures and protocols which provide improved performance as well as support for services such as multicasting.;First, Rainbow, a circuit-switched WDM network prototype, is modeled and analyzed using a technique called equilibrium point analysis (EPA). The results show the existence of an optimal timeout duration for the protocol, and the analysis can be used to find this optimal point for a given set of system parameters. Second, a new class of protocols, called multiconfiguration multihop protocols, is developed and analyzed. This class of protocols is intended to provide a balance between the amount of time a transmitter or receiver spends tuning from one wavelength to another, and the number of intermediate nodes or hops traversed by a packet. The protocols provide a viable alternative to existing protocols which typically either require frequent tuning of transmitters and receivers, or require high average hop distances. Third, a number of algorithms for scheduling multicast transmissions in a way which optimizes the utilization of network resources is developed. By minimizing the amount of time a node spends waiting for a multicast message, the network may achieve higher throughputs. Finally, a new node architecture for wavelength-routed networks is presented. The architecture allows for low-cost scalability in a network while maintaining reasonable performance when compared to a wavelength-routing-switch node architecture. |
