How does spatial reuse increase the available bandwidth on the ring?
Typical ring architectures require that the source node remove its traffic from the ring once a full round trip has been completed, even though communication may only have been required on a short segment of the ring. This was done since the source node had no knowledge of the destination node’s location on the ring. RPR has this knowledge and can eliminate ring bandwidth wasted after the destination has received the traffic. The spatial reuse feature extracts packets from the optical ring once they reach the destination node. This frees up ring bandwidth allowing other ports to reuse the “space” on the ring. Multicast and broadcast packets are handled through a time-to-live counter that instructs the last destination node on the ring to discard the packet.
