A simulation study on a high-speed slotted-ring access mechanism with dynamically adaptive slot sizes

Abstract

Two access mechanisms complementary in performance are the token ring and the slotted ring. While the token ring outperforms the slotted ring for long messages, the latter performs significantly better for short messages. The paper shows that the factor that causes this difference is the number of tokens on the ring. It proposes a new network design in which the number of tokens has been made adaptive, resulting in a network that can be made to behave like both the token ring and the slotted ring, or anything in between, i.e. it performs optimally for any given message length. The paper presents first simulation results that show the performance gain that is achieved by using this principle. Further, it introduces a new priority mechanism in which an upper bound for the access delay of high priority messages is guaranteed.<>