Full utilization and fairness on high speed bus networks

Many existing protocols indicate that full utilization and fairness might be incompatible in high-speed high-latency MANs or LANs. The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between full utilization and fairness. A new protocol called FUFA (fully utilized and fair) is designed to demonstrate some of the basic properties. We define full utilization and fairness precisely, and show that both are achieved together in the proposed protocol. The main idea is that each station takes account of the idle slots propagated previously to interpret the information from downstream (i.e., estimated aggregate number of data segments in the queue downstream and the estimated number of active downstream stations). This allows the active downstream stations to be served in a round robin fashion according to the updated information.