A versatile access scheduling scheme for real-time local area networks

The author deals with the implementation of access scheduling facilities in shared-medium local area networks. A global-information-based distributed scheduling mechanism is presented. This versatile mechanism permits the implementation of virtually all scheduling policies. Applications are considered to IEEE 802.3, which in its original version was probabilistic and incapable of priority handling. Using the scheduling algorithm, a deterministic CSMA/CD (carrier sense multiple access with collision detection) network can be built with a scheduling facility, suitable for time-critical applications