Performance of RCP-II

The rotation counter protocol (RCP) is a token-passing ring protocol that includes a special field called the rotation counter in the token. It is capable of correlating the traffic among various stations and hence providing priority access. Not only is the mean delay of high-priority traffic small and almost constant, but the delay jitter can also be capped. In this respect, RCP can be used to serve synchronous traffic such as voice. By giving voice packets higher-priority access to the network, their real-time requirement can be satisfied in integrated services. In this paper we evaluate the integrated-services performance of RCP in terms of delay, jitter and throughput. Since this protocol can be adapted to the fibre-optic network, its performance is also compared with that of FDDI. Our performance study demonstrates that RCP-II is a potential candidate for high-speed token ring protocols.