Temporary overload in high speed backbone networks

The authors study packet loss in high speed networks interconnecting conventional local area networks (LANs). They consider two different techniques to control contention at the station where packets leave the high speed network and must wait for service by the LAN. One technique is based on a backoff strategy where packet transmission to a temporary overloaded station is interrupted for a randomly chosen time. The other technique studied uses rate-based flow control. A discussion of results for both fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) and distributed queue dual bus (DQDB) shows protocol-specific peculiarities requiring different solutions to different problems. Packet loss characteristics obtained for FDDI and DQDB are very close to each other