“Session swapping”: a new approach for optimal bandwidth sharing of ring circuit switched channels

The paper introduces a new approach, called session swapping, for bandwidth sharing of circuit switched channels in a ring network. This approach enables to divide a single channel among several sessions in a fair manner, with no loss of bandwidth. According to this approach, packets are removed from the ring before reaching their destination, and retransmitted later. The paper proves that any protocol that shares a single channel among several sessions without using session swapping would waste some of the channel bandwidth. Then, it presents a protocol that uses session swapping and yields optimal and fair sharing of a single channel among several sessions. Finally, the paper shows that session swapping can be extended to handle a more general case, where a single channel should be shared among N sessions unevenly, based on some allocation key