Patent ID: 7646979

Claim:
A method to implement a medium access control (MAC) protocol for a local-area optical wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) network, the method comprising: controlling inter-node communication on the WDM network by transmitting a first control packet over a control channel of the WDM network, the WDM network including a scheduler, a data channel, and a plurality of nodes, each of the plurality of nodes coupled to the control channel and the data channel, the first control packet specifying a first one of the plurality of nodes in the network as a source node, a second one of the plurality of nodes in the network as a destination node, a value which corresponds to an amount of information which the source node can transmit, and a preview of a second control packet; and after transmitting the first control packet, waiting a predetermined period of time related to the value specified in the first control packet.