Design of a distributed isochronous channel management protocol for IEEE 802.6 MAN QPSX

A fully distributed isochronous channel management protocol based on QPSX which is a major candidate for the IEEE 802.6 metropolitan area network (MAN) is proposed. The system transmits asynchronous traffic and call-setup packets using the distributed queue protocol of QPSX. In the proposed protocol, each station assigns, maintains and deallocates its isochronous channels without communicating with other stations. In order to allocate minimum bandwidth to isochronous traffic, bandwidth allocated to silence calls is used to transmit nonisochronous traffic. At the time of system reconfiguration, channel information is easily modified and communication can continue during recovery. The proposed protocol is compared with the centralized isochronous channel management protocol by simulation. The proposed protocol has shorter data delay, higher isochronous channel utilization, and fewer isochronous slots for same volume of traffic than the centralized protocol.<>