A Flow-Aware Mac Protocol for a Passive Optical Metropolitan Area Network

The paper introduces an original MAC protocol for a passive optical metropolitan area network using Time-domain Wavelength Interleaved Networking (TWIN). Optical channels are shared under the distributed control of destinations using a packet-based polling algorithm. This MAC is inspired more by EPON dynamic bandwidth allocation than the slotted, GPON-like access control generally envisaged for TWIN. Management of source-destination traffic streams is flow-aware with the size of allocated time slices being proportional to the number of active flows.