Design of a large-scale Gbit/s MAN using a cyclic reservation-based MAC protocol

In this paper, a large-scale Gbit/s metropolitan area network (MAN) based on hierarchical ring topologies has been investigated. The network is constituted by backbone and local rings, which are connected by bridges. In the network, traffic congestion may occur in bridges due to the mismatch of transmission speed between backbone and local rings. To cope with the issue, a scheme based on a cyclic reservation-based access method is proposed for the medium access control (MAC) protocol of the network. With the scheme, the protocol can both achieve the fair access of network bandwidth and resolve the traffic congestion in bridges. Particularly, this approach reduces the implementation complexity and cost and enhances efficiency of the global network. Finally, several simulative experiments are performed, and some optimistic results are revealed.