This paper proposes the channel-access protocol suitable to a very high speed photonic WDM network with star configuration, which can provide a high channel utilization and insensitivity to the propagation delay. The proposed protocol employs a control channel and a simple status table to deal with the propagation delay which has been a major limiting factor in the performance of the very high speed optical communication networks. The control channel transmits control information in order to reserve access on data channels, and each node constitutes a status table after the reception of control pckets which holds information about the availbility of destination node and data channel. The proposed protocol is insensitive to the propagation delay time by removing necessity of the retransmission and by allowing parallel transmission of control packet and data packets. It is proved in analysis and discrete event simulation that the proposed protocol is superior in throughput and mean delay, especially at the high load conditions compared to the existing high speed channel-access protocols.