THE EFFECTS OF CONTROLLING CAPTURE ON MULTIMEDIA TRAFFIC FOR SHARED ETHERNET SYSTEMS

The IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard is evolving to support much higher da ta rates and improved quality of service. Even low cost half-duplex CS MA/CD networks can be improved using an enhanced backwards-compatible collision arbitration algorithm known as the Binary Logarithmic Arbitr ation Method (BLAM) now being proposed as the IEEE 802.3w draft standa rd. BLAM is designed to co-exist fairly with the existing Binary Expon ential Backoff (BEB) algorithm, while eliminating its short-term unfai rness problems. In this paper, we focus on how BLAM improves Ethernet performance for multimedia data transport. Analytical, simulation, and prototype hardware experimental results using synthetic, trace, and a ctual measured traffic are presented. It is shown that BLAM Ethernets can support significantly greater numbers of video streams than existi ng BEB Ethernets and if the delivery requirements for the video traffi c are not tao strict, that BLAM Ethernets can even support video if th e network is completely saturated with data traffic.