Family of protocols for ring LANs with an auxiliary bus and parallel reservations

Abstract

A family of local area network protocols is presented. The LAN we consider consists of a ring and a bidirectional bus to which stations are connected via adapters and passive taps respectively. The data frames in these protocols can avoid several stations resulting in less delays. The main feature of these protocols is that reservation procedures for the bypassed stations take place in parallel with the data frame transmission. Another interesting feature is that all the standard token ring functions do operate under the proposed topology. The last member of this family is a protocol with the ability to change its behaviour according to the offered load at each station. The performance of the protocols is evaluated by simulation models. Also performance comparisons of the new protocols are presented.