CSMA/CD with Deterministic Contention Resolution

This paper presents a novel media access protocol CSMA/CD with deterministic contention resolution (DCR) for a local area network. It usually operates as CSMA/CD, but once a collision occurs it resolves the collision using a kind of implicit token passing. An analysis was conducted on DCR performance characteristics based on simulation studies and in comparison to conventional CSMA/CD and implicit token passing. It was found that they were very satisfactory in terms of throughput, message delay, and delay standard deviation, these performance characteristics make DCR attractive as a media access protocol for combined voice and data traffic. It has also been shown that this protocol assures robustness against various kinds of transmission errors and station failures. A prototype of a local area network using this protocol has been developed. It consists of a pair of optical fiber buses to which each station is attached via a pair of directional couplers.