The Flooding Sink - A New Approach to Local Area Networking

A new local area networking technology is presented. The approach is based on an old routing algorithm called flooding — forward messages to all neighbouring nodes. The problem with this algorithm is that the network is deluged with duplicate messaes. The solution is a simple device which uses local memory to detect and ignore redundant messages, thus also acting as a message sink. Networks based on this device can be more flexible and reliable than current networks. Flooding also has the advantage that any messages lost due to transmission errors are quickly replaced by one of the copies. This can make low-level protocols unnecessary. When the low-level protocols are omitted, significant performance improvements are achieved. Simulation results are presented which show that this flooding technology can perform better than current CSMA and ring technologies.