Abstract
Although WDM-based single-hop star networks are attractive owing to their all-optical communication features, the throughput of such lightwave networks is limited due to the small number of available wavelengths. In this paper, a wavelength-reusable local lightwave network which consists of interconnected WDM star networks is proposed. Based on this architecture, the lower bound for the problems of minimizing the switching duration is derived. A transmission scheduling algorithm for this architecture to efficiently reuse the wavelengths is also proposed. The analytical result shows that the proposed scheduling algorithm always produces solutions no greater than twice of the lower bounds. Simulation results show that given the same number of users and available wavelengths, the solutions (in terms of the average switching duration and the average number of switching matrices) obtained by the proposed scheduling algorithm on the interconnected WDM networks are better than the optimal solution on a single-star WDM network. In most cases, the performance improvement achieves 20% to 45%.