WDM metropolitan area network based on a parallel IEEE 802.6 architecture

Current metropolitan area networks are often a bottleneck for new, sophisticated multimedia services. Not even the IEEE 802.6 Distributed Queue Dual Bus (DQDB) manages to ensure these new services of adequate performance, especially when the communication channel bit rate is high. One way to achieve networks with a high throughput is to use multiple channels on optical fiber, by means of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), and parallelize operations for access to the communication channel. In this paper the authors present a WDM Metropolitan Area Network based on the DQDB protocol in which the various user information segments are parallely inserted into the transmission queues. On the basis of the network architecture proposed, a management structure for multimedia applications is presented.