Abstract

Developments in wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technology serve as a strong basis for providing growth capability in an FDDI network. The objective is to preserve as much of the FDDI standard as possible, while offering enhanced capability through WDM devices. This upgrade can be incremental; i.e., only a subset of the nodes can be upgraded. This upgrading is done by segmenting the huge bandwidth of a single Fiber into a number of nonoverlapping wavelength channels (say W), each operating at whatever rate one desires, e.g., at the FDDI rate. The use of WDM allows two neighboring FDDI nodes to be connected through W logical channels. A node can logically exist on a subset m (1 ≤ m ≤ W) of these channels (subrings). A bridge node can attach itself logically to both subrings. This multiwavelength version of FDDI, called wavelength-distributed data interface (WDDI), is shown in Fig. 1.

© 1994 Optical Society of America