Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) has emerged as the most popular technology for utilising the huge bandwidth of optical fibre. This paper surveys medium access control protocols for the star, bus and ring WDM network topologies. The performance of two recently developed protocols, Pipelining Cyclic Scheduling Algorithm (PCSA) and Reservation/ACK/Transmission Protocol (RATP), is evaluated by stochastic simulation. It was found that RATP’s performance (measured by throughput and delay) degrades sharply with the increase in network size, making it impractical for use in metropolitan- or wide-area networks. PCSA does not suffer from this restriction, and can realise a throughput of 1. It also delivers short average packet delays, especially under light to moderate system loads.