Patent ID: 7206511

Claim:
A method of operating an optical communications system comprising a wavelength-dependent optical router, a plurality of terminals, each terminal including at least one wavelength-tuneable optical transmitter, at least one passive optical network interconnecting the plurality of terminals via the wavelength-dependent optical router, and a network controller, the method comprising: a) transmitting data time-slot request packets to the network controller from the plurality of terminals on a number of different wavelength channels in a common signalling time slot within a data transmission frame alone a path which bypasses said wavelength-dependent router; b) applying different respective delays in the optical domain to said slot request packets on different wavelength channels thereby creating one or more time-series of request packets; c) receiving said time-series of slot request packets at a common optical receiver; and d) at the network controller, processing requests received from the optical receiver and allocating transmission slots in a subsequent data transmission frame to terminals.