Interconnection of high speed token ring LANs: a switch-connection approach

The use of a switch for the interconnection of two high-speed token-ring LANs to avoid congestion at the bridge caused by the large bridge processing time is proposed. A simple network access method is described, and the delay performance of the switch-connected system is analyzed and compared with that of the bridge-connected system. For high-speed token-ring LANs, the comparison shows that the bridge will be a bottleneck unless its processing time is significantly reduced. The proposed interconnection using the switch eliminates the bottleneck problem and, depending on the bridge processing time, it can attain better delay performance than the bridge-connected system over a wide range of system parameters