Integration of synchronous and asynchronous traffic on the MetaRing and its performance study

In this paper, we describe and evaluate a protocol for integrating two types of traffic on the MetaRing Architecture. Synchronous (reserved or real-time) traffic which is periodic and requires a connection set-up and will have guaranteed bandwidth and bounded delay, and asynchronous or bursty traffic with no real-time constraints that can use the remainder of the bandwidth in a fair manner. The integration mechanism is functionally equivalent to the timed-token function in FDDI, which is a shared media ring protocol. Simulation results are also presented to show the effects of the fairness and flow control signals on the performance of the network.