DISTRIBUTED PROTOCOL FOR INTEGRATED VOICE DATA TOKEN PASSING RING NETWORKS

In this paper we present a distributed protocol for integrated voice/d ata token passing ring networks. No central control station is needed, and hence the fault tolerance of the network is expected to be increa sed. Bandwidth is dynamically allocated according to the varying traff ic load. A dynamic counter, appended to the free token, is used to con trol the number of voice call connections on the ring. The data traffi c 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 co nstraints of the voice traffic are well satisfied under this protocol. A set of guidelines are derived to determine the maximum number of vo ice calls allowed on the ring according to the current network environ ments. Criteria for determining the packet length and the buffer size of voice packets are also provided. Numerical results show that our pr otocol exhibits a well-controlled packet delay for data traffic and th e maximum delay of each voice packet is about B times the generation t ime of a voice packet. where B is the number of pre-allocated voice pa cket buffers per voice call.