Pipelined transmission scheduling in all-optical TDM/WDM rings

Two properties of optical transmissions, namely, unidirectional propagation and predictable propagation delay, make it possible to pipeline packet transmissions in all-optical networks. In this paper we study the problem of scheduling All-to-All Personalized Communication (AAPC) in unidirectional TDM/WDM rings with pipelined transmissions, which can achieve a much higher bandwidth utilization than non-pipelined transmissions. For a given number of wavelengths, K, and number of transmitter-receiver pairs per node, T, the theoretical lower bound (TLB) on the schedule lengths is derived, and scheduling methods which can achieve near optimal results are proposed for three different cases, namely, T = K, 2 less than or equal to T < K and T = 1, respectively.