IP differentiated services over a WDM passive optical star

Important recent advances in the field of opto-electronic devices make WDM optical networks a promising solution for the next generation Internet. Such technologies can be considered in the long-haul, metro and access sections of carrier's infrastructures. The main issue in this paper is the design of a Metropolitan Area Network based on a WDM passive optical star well suited for IP differentiated services. Our proposal focuses on both the MAC protocol and buffer management at the end nodes. Various simulation results outline the capacity of our proposal to satisfy the IP Diffserv [1] QoS requirements, as they are specified by the IETF. For that purpose, both Expedited Forwarding [3] and Assured Forwarding [4] are investigated.