Simplified photonic bus and ring networks using a headend controller

Research in photonics is currently aimed at ways to exploit the enormous information-carrying capacity of optical fiber. Many networks based upon wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) have recently been proposed using passive star couplers. However, new advances in travelling-wave and doped-fiber amplifiers have sparked interest in multichannel ring and bus networks. A new network architecture is proposed which is applicable to both …