METANET - PRINCIPLES OF AN ARBITRARY TOPOLOGY LAN

The MetaNet is a scalable local area network (LAN) architecture with a n arbitrary topology and a switch at each node (i.e., a switch based L AN). Its design provides on one hand a service in which any node can t ry to transmit asynchronously in a bursty manner without reservation a s much as it can (as in traditional LAN), and on the other hand the ne twork access and flow control ensure the following properties: 1) no p acket loss due to congestion, 2) fair access to the network, 3) no dea dlocks, and 4) self-routing with broadcast. The switching over this ne twork requires only a 5) single buffer per input link, The MetaNet is asynchronous, distributed, and designed for transmission of fixed size cells or variable size packets. It can be viewed as a ''general-topol ogy buffer-insertion architecture with fairness,'' thus generalizing t he MetaRing architecture.