Future local area network’s (LAN) are expected to provide the wide variety of services, both low and high speed ones.. The low speed services could be handled by evolutionary versions of the presently available networks. The high speed ones require a new generation of local area networks. The target is therefore an integrated services boras-band optical local area network (BOLAN) that supports the whole spectrum of traffic. Previous efforts, such as WDM star solution for operating a BOLAN, although attractive from the bandwidth point of view, causes difficult implementation problem. STARNET is a broadband backbone optical wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) LAN. Based on a physical passive star topology, STARNET offers all users two logical subnetworks: a high-speed reconfigurable packet-switched data subnetwork and a moderate-speed fix-tuned packet-switched control subnetwork. Thus, STARNET supports traffic with a wide range of speed and continuity characteristics. Following is the logical topology of STARNET.
Fig. 1: Schematic of STARNET node
Multi-gigabit-per-second STAR has been demonstrated. Schematic of a node of STARNET is presented in Fig. 1 and interconnection between two nodes can be seen in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2: Interconnection of two STARNET nodes