DISTRIBUTED PROTOCOL FOR INTEGRATED VOICE DATA TOKEN PASSING RING NETWORKS

In this paper we present a distributed protocol for integrated voice/data token passing ring networks. No central control station is needed, and hence the fault tolerance of the network is expected to be increased. Bandwidth is dynamically allocated according to the varying traffic load. A dynamic counter, appended to the free token, is used to control the number of voice call connections on the ring. The data traffic flow is controlled by using two local counters kept at each network station. To improve the throughput of the network. silent voice slots are allowed to carry data packets. We have shown that the real-time constraints of the voice traffic are well satisfied under this protocol. A set of guidelines are derived to determine the maximum number of voice calls allowed on the ring according to the current network environments. Criteria for determining the packet length and the buffer size of voice packets are also provided. Numerical results show that our protocol exhibits a well-controlled packet delay for data traffic and the maximum delay of each voice packet is about B times the generation time of a voice packet. where B is the number of pre-allocated voice packet buffers per voice call.