Integration of multi-ring on the MetaRing architecture

Abstract

The author describes the principles for constructing a single MetaRing system that is composed of multiple rings. The motivation for such structure is to increase the spatial reuse and enhance the fault tolerance of the system. Each ring in this structure can be viewed as a cluster of users with relatively higher internal interaction than external interaction with users in other clusters. 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, by a factor of 4 or more. The fairness mechanism for this architecture is distributed, based on a control signal that regulates the access to the ring, and is extremely simple and robust. The efficiency of this architecture does not degrade as the bandwidth and physical size of the system increases.