AN ALGORITHM FOR THE EFFICIENT UTILIZATION OF BANDWIDTH IN THE SLOTTED RING

The slotted ring local area network is very efficient under light load, but suffers from severe performance degradations as the load increases, especially if message sizes are highly variable. This paper presents an algorithm, in the form of a medium access protocol, to allow for the efficient utilization of the bandwidth of the slotted ring. The protocol is based on the release of slots by destination stations without the requirement of explicitly identifying the source and destination stations of every slot, except for the first and last slots of a message transmission. This means that stations latencies do not have to be increased. As a direct consequence of this property, the source and destination identification do not have to be included in every slot, therefore reducing the message overhead. The algorithm results in an improved performance over the entire workload range, and under most workload conditions, therefore illustrating how far the performance of the slotted ring can go.