On the resource reservation approach to design a large-scale and ultra high-speed MAN

To support a great number of dispersed users in a wider area with high-spee d communication services, we develop a large-scale and ultra high-speed MAN based on hierarchical ring configuration. The network is constituted by ba ckbone and local rings, which are connected by bridges. Tn such a network, traffic congestion may always occur due to the mismatch of transmission spe ed between backbone and local rings. To cope with the issue, we adopt a res ource reservation approach based on the method of cyclic reservation-based access control for controlling access to different network resources, viz. network bandwidth and bridge buffers. By this approach, a MAC protocol that can achieve fair access to network resources and avoid traffic congestion is proposed for the network. To evaluate the performance properties of the network, several simulation experiments are performed and some optimistic r esults are revealed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.