Time and wavelength division multiaccess with acoustooptic tunable filters

In this article we propose a novel time and wavelength division multiple access (T/WDMA) scheme for a metropolitan area network based on a passive optical star. This scheme supports circuit-switched traffic in an environment with a large number of users with applications that span a broad range of data rates (from voice to full motion video). The scheme can be implemented using acoustooptic tunable filters characterized by a relatively large tuning range (around 100 wavelengths) and a relatively low tuning speed (around 10 μs). Performance of this scheme is studied by simulation for the uniform, single-rate, point-to-point traffic case. We also show how the multiwavelength filtering capability of acoustooptic tunable filters can be used to improve the performance of the proposed T/WDMA scheme.