No slot wasting bandwidth balancing with immediate use of TAR bit

Abstract

The no slot wasting bandwidth balancing (NSW BWB) mechanism has been recently proposed for high speed DQDB networks. Its advantage is that it introduces fairness without wasting channel slots and can converge very fast to the steady state where fair bandwidth allocation is achieved. However, it may discriminate against lightly loaded stations in terms of delay. In this paper we propose a variation of the NSW BWB mechanism which enables lightly loaded stations to have a faster access to the transmission medium and thus lower delays. We provide a proof of the fairness of the new mechanism and investigate its delay performance. Furthermore, we compare it with NSW BWB as well as with the BWB mechanism which has been incorporated in the IEEE 802.6 standard.<>