Integration of synchronous and asynchronous traffic on the MetaRing architecture and its analysis

The MetaRing architecture is a full-duplex ring with fairness and spatial reuse. The authors describe a protocol for integrating two types of traffic on the MetaRing: synchronous or real-time traffic which is periodic and requires a connection set-up and will have guaranteed bandwidth and bounded delay; and connectionless or asynchronous traffic with no real-time constraints that can use the remainder of the bandwidth. The integration mechanism is functionally equivalent to the function in the fiber distributed data interface (FDDI). However, unlike FDDI, it guarantees round-robin fairness among nodes with asynchronous traffic and has spatial reuse. A Markovian state space formulation of the network is given. This formulation was used for an efficient simulation of the network with an arbitrary number of nodes. An upper bound on the delay of the synchronous data is also presented.<>