MRACMAN: a high-throughput backbone metropolitan area network using simplified bridges

MRACMAN (multislot reservation alternating cycle control metropolitan area network) is a new high-throughput backbone MAN aimed at interconnecting a collection of local area networks (LANs) via simplified bridges. The backbone network and LANs are all based on a dual unidirectional slotted bus architecture. The simplified bridges (the backbone nodes) perform only simple buffering and routing logic. In addition, the high-throughput scheme (MRAC) is used as the medium access control protocol on both the backbone network and each interconnected LAN. MRACMAN, as shown, offers high throughput by means of efficient and parallel transmissions among all local LANs and the backbone network. With a reasonable degree of traffic locality assumed, simplified bridges are guaranteed congestion-free. The authors provide a performance evaluation and comparison via simulation results to demonstrate the feasibility of congestion-free bridges and throughput superiority of MRACMAN over other MANs