Fairness issues of the DQDB protocol

The draft distributed queue dual bus (DQDB) protocol is a proposed standard for metropolitan area networks (MANs). A study is made of fairness issues of the current version of this IEEE 802.6 working document, which is intended to be the basis for MAN service offered by public network providers. Performance is studied with respect to both delays and throughput. It is shown that the throughput provided to specific users may depend on the geographic location with respect to other users. On the other hand, DQDB yields fair medium access for the majority of realistic scenarios.<<ETX>>