METANET: principles of an arbitrary topology LAN

The MetaNet is a scalable local area network (LAN) architecture with an arbitrary topology and a switch at each node (i.e., a switch based LAN). Its design provides on one hand a service in which any node can try to transmit asynchronously in a bursty manner without reservation as much as it can (as in traditional LAN), and on the other hand the network access and flow control ensure the following properties: (1) no packet loss due to congestion, (2) fair access to the network, (3) no deadlocks, and (4) self-routing with broadcast. The switching over this network requires only a (5) single buffer per input link. The MetaNet is asynchronous, distributed, and designed for transmission of fixed size cells or variable size packets. It can be viewed as a “general-topology buffer-insertion architecture with fairness,” thus generalizing the MetaRing architecture