TA2I: Time Slot Access with Acknowledge Insertion

This paper introduces a new medium access scheme for ring-based, real-time local area networks which is called time slot access with acknowledge insertion (TA²I). It is a variant of time division multiple access (TDMA) together with a temporarily insertion of short acknowledges based on register insertion. TA²I implements synchronous time slots in the form of circulating transport frames. The proposed medium access scheme tries to solve the problem of poor performance due to unbalanced network traffic with extension algorithms that allow the reallocation of unused time slots. Simulation results are presented that show the real-time capability even under overload conditions and the better performance of the extension algorithms