Design and analysis of a pipeline ring protocol

A protocol that can accommodate multiple-message transmissions in a ring-type local area networks (LAN) is proposed. This protocol allows the destination station to remove the message from the ring and create a token for establishing a transmission segment in the ring. Compared with other ring networks supporting multiple message transmissions, this protocol has the following advantages, including: (1) only one-bit delay at each station, (2) fully distributed control, (3) lower hardware complexity and (4) no need to cut messages into packets. The ring throughput is derived for arbitrary message distributions for both the unidirectional single ring and the bidirectional double ring. Numerical results for three- and four-node networks are presented. Due to computation complexity, the delay and throughput of a 50-node ring is obtained by simulation. For fixed-size messages, the maximum throughput of the four-node and 50-node pipeline rings are 1.68 and 1.67, respectively. For double rings the per-ring throughput for the four-node and 50-node cases are 3.2 and 3.26, respectively. Two service disciplines are also compared. It is found that the farthest-within-segment discipline always perform slightly better than the first-come-first-served discipline.<<ETX>>