Design and implementation of OTCA MAC protocol for high-speed point-to-point ring network

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of OTCA (ownership-tagged cell allocation) MAC protocol for a unidirectional slotted ring network with a distributed fair medium access. A point-to-point (p2p) interconnection network in a ring topology with a high-speed serial link and the sharing of network bandwidth among multiple communicating nodes offers a very promising low cost solution in the growing gigabit communication system, where it is a challenge to run high quality real-time multimedia. Some services have explicit timing requirements. The OTCA MAC protocol provides the deterministic network behavior guaranteeing the worst latency bound and the minimum bandwidth availability. On a 1.063 Gpbs p2p ring network comprising 4 nodes, the OTCA MAC protocol ensures a bandwidth of 265 Mbps for synchronous data, 232 Mbps for asynchronous data (thus a total of 497 Mbps for a mode), and the worst medium access latency is bounded with 17.46 us.