A priority-aware CSMACP MAC protocol for the all-optical IP-over-WDM metropolitan area ring network

The paper proposes a priority-aware MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol for a core metropolitan area network in the next generation Internet, which is an OPS (Optical Packet Switch) network that all-optically and directly transfers IP packets over a WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) ring network. It uses the concepts of CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access), CP (Carrier Preemption), and the priority mechanism to support all-optical and priority-aware transferring of the IP packets of the nodes in the WDM ring networks; the new MAC protocol is named priority-aware CSMACP. Since the traditional IP provides the best effort service only, supporting IP packets with QoS transfer has become a crucial issue for multimedia transmission. Today, while the network bandwidth has grown dramatically, the kind of applications transferred are mostly high-bandwidth demanding multimedia transmissions. It is predictable that the end-to-end QoS will be an important area of study in the next generation Internet. This paper accordingly proposes an advanced mechanism for this, and gives a differential service model to analyze and simulate the average packet delay for each class.