S. Casale et A. Lacorte, A PARALLEL MAC ARCHITECTURE FOR A GIGABITS S DQDB MAN SUITABLE FOR MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS/, European transactions on telecommunications, 7(6), 1996, pp. 541-551
Medium access control protocols based on a dual bus topology, such as
the IEEE 802.6 Distributed Queue Dual Bus (DQDB), are usually consider
ed to be highly satisfactory for high speed networks. But the DQDB can
only partly support new sophisticated multimedia services, mainly bec
ause the increase in the channel bit rate needed to meet the greater b
andwidth requirements causes an increase in unfairness in the medium a
ccess control of the nodes. In this paper the authors propose a Gigabi
t/s Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) based on the IEEE 802.6 DQDB proto
col and multichannel connectivity on optical fiber, by means of Wavele
ngth Division Multiplexing (WDM). They present a parallel node archite
cture in which N DQDB subnodes parallelly access N WDM channels. Chann
el access at each node is regulated by N finite state machines operati
ng independently and sharing a single MAC Convergence Functions (MCF)
block for the segmentation and reassembly of user information. On the
basis of the MAC architecture proposed, a network management structure
is also presented, with particular reference to the Quality of Servic
e monitoring processes. The proposed architecture is more modular than
the DQDB standard; it provides greater fairness and better access del
ay and allows efficient management of service classes with priority.