A local lightwave network can be constructed by employing two-way fibers to connect nodes in a passive-star physical topology, and the available optical bandwidth may be effectively accessed by the nodal transmitters and receivers at electronic rates using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). The number of channels, /spl omega/, in a WDM network is limited by technology and is usually less than the number of nodes, N, in the network. We provide a general method using channel sharing to construct practical multi-hop networks under this limitation. Channel sharing may be achieved through time division multiplexing. The method is applied to a generalized shuffle-exchange-based multi-hop architecture, called GEMNET. Multicasting-the ability to transmit information from a single source node to multiple destination nodes-is becoming an important requirement in high-performance networks. Multicasting, if improperly implemented, can be bandwidth-abusive. Channel sharing is one approach toward efficient management of multicast traffic. We develop a general modeling procedure for the analysis of multicast (point-to-multipoint) traffic in shared-channel, multihop WDM networks. The analysis is comprehensive in that it considers all components of delay that packets in the network experience-namely, synchronization, queuing, transmission, and propagation. The results show that, in the presence of multicast traffic, WDM networks with /spl omega/>N channels may actually perform better than networks with /spl omega//spl ges/N channels.
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