NETWORK TOPOLOGY AND EXCHANGE TIME OF MESSAGES IN A LOCAL-AREA NETWORK USING INTERNETWORK PROCESSORS

Many factories are currently using large-scale local area networks (LA Ns). The large-scale LANs consist of many buses and ring LANs connecte d to a main highspeed backbone ring network through bridges and router s. This paper deals with modeling such a large-scale LAN and describes the relationship between network topology and message exchange time a mong computers. For a given network with a limited number of repeater devices, an approximate solution for the minimum message exchange time was obtained. Network conditions that realize the solution are also d escribed.