Overview of the MetaRing architecture

Abstract

The basic MetaRing architecture is a full-duplex ring providing fairness and spatial bandwidth reuse. Concurrent access and spatial bandwidth reuse enable simultaneous transmission over disjoint segments of the bidirectional ring. It therefore increases the potential throughput in each direction, by a factor of four or more. In this work, we overview the MetaRing principles: (1) Distributed global fairness algorithm, a simple and robust mechanism based on a single control signal (i.e., one bit of information) that regulates the access to the ring. (2) Protocol for service integration of: (i) synchronous or real-time traffic which is periodic and requires a connection set-up and which will have guaranteed bandwidth as well as bounded delay, and (ii) connectionless or asynchronous traffic with no real-time constraints that can use the remainder of the bandwidth. Integration is an important function for multi-media applications. (3) Protocol and requirements for multi-ring and dual-bus MetaRing networks. (4) Principles and requirements for interconnecting MetaRing with wide-area networks (WANs). We show that (i) the WAN-to-ring interconnection requires a separate queue for asynchronous traffic and relies on the use of the fairness mechanism for internal flow control, whereas (ii) the WAN-to-dual-bus configuration of the MetaRing network is simpler, since it does not require any buffering and does not rely on a fairness mechanism for internal flow control furthermore; it is fault tolerant and has better synchronous traffic performance. © 1994.