A powerful simulation technique suitable for performance studies of various CSMA/CD LANs

Abstract

One of the growing area in the communication industry is the inter-network of the increased proliferation of computers, particularly via local area network (LAN). Many commercial LAN which use CSMA/CD as an access protocol, claim the ability to support hundreds of stations. We present a tool for use in performance studies of such networks when the number of stations is large. The proposed tool is a simulation technique, which requires partitioning the network stations into a few primary stations and the remainder as background stations. The background stations are modeled as a group by a background algorithm based on a dynamic CSMA/CD model which uses a set of probabilities and sampling to produce in a recurrent manner, a stochastic sequence of busy/idle periods. Through simulation results, it is proved that the suggested simulation technique is more powerful and efficient than discrete-event simulation specially when the number of network stations is large enough because the probabilistic simulation technique proposed in this paper needs less rum time on the computer and small storage capacity.