Performance comparison of 100Base-T fast ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN

There are two competing technologies for 100 Mbps Ethernet, namely IEEE 802.3u 100Base-T Fast Ethernet and IEEE 802.12 100VG-AnyLAN. The former technology is based on the same medium access control protocol as the popular IEEE 802.3 CSMA/CD network, while the later is based on a new demand priority protocol. Contrary to common belief, a test conducted recently by Newman and Levy using commercially available adaptor cards and hubs showed that 100Base-T networks outperformed 100VG-AnyLAN networks with similar configurations by a significant margin. From the analytical models developed, we found that the anomaly is due to the larger-than-expected overheads incurred by the 100VG-AnyLAN hub in polling every station in the network in a round robin manner.