Emerging trends-Full-duplex and the switched LAN

Abstract

Ethernet, token-ring, and FDDI are well established protocols for regulating the access to a common transmission medium among a large number of stations. All of the attached stations share this common medium and its bandwidth. Sharing of a common medium reduces the bandwidth that is available to an individual station. To increase bandwidth to the end user, emerging LAN topologies are departing from shared-media, shared-bandwidth methods in favor of dedicated-media and dedicated-bandwidth methods. Dedicated-bandwidth switched LANs can take advantage of full-duplex operation of attached stations. This is in contrast to the normal half-duplex operation of LAN stations on a shared-bandwidth LAN. This paper describes the evolution of shared-media, shared-bandwidth LANs into dedicated-media, dedicated-bandwidth switched LANs with full-duplex operation of the attached stations.<>