Affiliations: Information Systems, Office of the Registrar, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2M7 Canada, E-mail: ashvanee@cs.ualberta.ca | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kuwait University, PO Box 5969, Safat, 13060 Kuwait, E-mail: kamal@eng.kuniv.edu.kw
Note: [] This research was supported in part by grants OGP-9187 from NSERC (Canada), and EE-062 from the Kuwait University Research Administration.
Note: [] During the preparation of this paper, the author was with the Department of Compnting Science, University of Alberta.
Note: [] Corresponding author. Tel.: +965 481 1188 (X5843); Fax: +965 481 7451. During the preparation of this paper, the author was with the Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta.
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new protocol, which we refer to as the R2-Net protocol. The objective of this proposal is to introduce an access protocol that is based on allowing active nodes to share the bandwidth in a round robin manner. By following such an approach, it is shown that the protocol does not suffer from the problems inherent in the DQDB protocol. The implementation of the round robin principle requires nodes to keep track of the number of active downstream nodes. In addition, and in order to overcome the adverse effects of the nonzero propagation delay, the total number of segments that must be transmitted by downstream nodes is also recorded. The protocol has several attractive features such as fairness in bandwidth distribution among nodes, a speedy convergence to such a distribution, a low access delay, and more importantly, insensitivity of such measures to node activity patterns. A simulation study has shown the satisfaction of such properties. Since priority is an important feature of every protocol, we also show how the R2-Net protocol can be generalized to implement priority.
Keywords: Computer-communication networks, network protocols, local networks, metropolitan area networks, simulation and modeling
