FARE: An efficient integrated MAC protocol for differentiated services in WDM metro rings

This study investigates the fairness control, collision avoidance and QoS support issues of a particular WDM dual-ring network known as FT²-TR². This system is an extended version of the original uni-directional FT-TR ring architecture, in which every node is equipped with a fixed-tuned transmitter and a tunable receiver on each ring. This study proposes a novel FAirness and REservation integrated protocol, designated FARE, which incorporates three mechanisms designed specifically to resolve the receiver collision problem, to achieve fairness among all of the network nodes, and to meet the tight delay requirements of multimedia applications. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate that FARE provides a high performance for real-time traffic while simultaneously providing significant performance improvements for best-effort traffic.