Integration of synchronous and asynchronous traffic on the MetaRing architecture and its analysis

The MetaRing architecture is a full-duplex ring with fairness and spatial reuse. Concurrent access and spatial reuse enable the simultaneous transmissions over disjoint segments of a bidirectional ring and therefore can increase the effective throughput in each direction. The fairness mechanism for this architecture is a simple, robust and distributed algorithm which is based on a control signal that regulates the access to the ring. The efficiency of this architecture does not degrade as the bandwidth and physical size of the system increases. In this work we describe a protocol for integrating two types of traffic on the MetaRing: (i) synchronous or real-time traffic which is periodic and requires a connection set-up and will have guaranteed bandwidth and bounded delay, and (ii) connectionless or asynchronous traffic with no real-time constraints that can use the remainder of the bandwidth. The integration mechanism is functionally equivalent to the TIMED-TOKEN function in FDDI. However, unlike FDDI, it guarantees roundrobin fairness among nodes with asynchronous traffic and it has spatial reuse. A Markovian state space formulation of the network is given. This formulation is used for an efficient simulation of the network with arbitrary number of nodes. An upper bound on the delay of the synchronous data is also presented.