As a new optical network architecture that can be built with currently available devices, light trail networks attract attention. A trail is an unidirectional communication channel which is set up by reserving a specific wavelength along a route between a source node and a destination node, and packet communication from an arbitrary node to its downstream nodes is possible. Because a trail is a shared medium, we need medium access control (MAC) to avoid collisions of packets. Token passing type MAC methods such as light-trail fair access MAC (LT-FA MAC) and adaptive round time MAC (ART MAC) have been proposed. In those methods, however, downstream bandwidth of the token holding node is only used, and upstream bandwidth becomes idle. In this paper, we try to improve throughput of a trail by using those idle bandwidth effectively in a token passing type MAC method. In order to achieve this, we propose a dynamic trail partitioning method that dynamically partitions a trail into upstream trail and downstream one at the token holding node, and permits parallel transfer of data using two trails. Numerical calculations and simulations show that the dynamic trail partitioning method can improve throughput by a maximum of more than 80%.
