With the proliferation of the world‐wide‐web (WWW) in all aspects of networking, current local and wide area networks can barely cope with the huge demand for network bandwidth. As a result, there is a world‐wide effort in upgrading current networks with high‐bandwidth fiber‐optic links that can potentially deliver Tera‐bits/sec. Wavelength‐Division‐Multiplexing (WDM) is an effective technique for utilizing the large bandwidth of an optical fiber. By allowing multiple messages to be simultaneously transmitted on a number of channels, WDM has the potential to significantly improve the performance of optical networks. The nodes in such a network can transmit and receive messages on any of the available channels by using and tuning one or more pairs of tunable transceivers. Several topologies have been proposed for WDM networks, which can be classified either under single‐hop networks or multiple‐hop networks. Of particular interest to us in this paper is the single‐hop topology where a WDM optical network is configured as a broadcast‐and‐select network in which all the inputs from the various nodes are combined into a passive star‐coupler, and the mixed optical information is broadcast to all destinations. To unleash the potential of single‐hop WDM passive star networks, efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols are needed to efficiently allocate and coordinate the system resources. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of state‐of‐the‐art MAC protocols, especially, MAC protocols for multimedia applications for WDM networks so as to give the readers an overview of the research efforts conducted in this area. In addition, it can serve as a starting point for further investigation into ways of coping with the current and the anticipated explosion of multimedia information transfer.