Performance investigation of a token passing access protocol for a multichannel optical fibre LAN

Abstract An alternative approach to multichannel local area network access is described. The new multichannel access scheme or protocol is based on a token passing arbitration policy. It is specifically intended for use with a starconfigured optical fibre LAN employing wavelength division multiplexing technology in order to provide a multichannel transmission medium. The multichannel network architecture comprises a single reservation channel and several equivalent speed data channels. Delay versus throughput performance characteristics for the network obtained by both analysis and discrete event simulation are shown. The multichannel token passing protocol is found to significantly improve these characteristics in comparison with a conventional single channel token passing approach using the same overall network transmission rate (i.e. the sum of the individual channel bit rates in the multichannel case). Furthermore, when the end-to-end propagation delay for an individual channel on the network becomes large, the multichannel token passing protocol is shown to exhibit an improved delay versus throughput performance over a multichannel protocol employing carrier sense multiple access with collision detection.