A Single-Hop Wavelength-Routed Local Area Network

Future LANs and MANs may be based upon multichannel, single-hop network architectures constructed using wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) and passive star couplers. Due to device limitations, the number of available channels may be smaller than desired. In this case, wavelength spatial re-use will be required to support an acceptable number of stations and performance. Recently, hierarchical wavelength re-use architectures have been proposed for this purpose [1].