Performance study of the MetaRing with Gb/s links

Abstract

MetaRing is a Gigabit/second Local Area Network architecture based on a dual(bi-directional) optical fiber ring with spatial reuse mechanism. Concurrent access and spatial reuse enable simultaneous transmissions over disjoint segments of a bidirectional ring, and therefore, can potentially increase the effective throughput by a factor of four. The architecture has two basic modes of operation: buffer insertion mode for variable size packets and slotted mode for fixed size packets. As a result, this architecture is suitable for a wide range of applications and environments. The heart of the architecture is a distributed global fairness mechanism that ensures fair access to the ring by all stations with little degradation in performance. The efficiency of this architecture does not degrade as the bandwidth and physical size of the system increases. In this paper, we use simulation to study the performance of MetaRing in the buffer insertion mode with variable length packets. We show through various delay-throughput curves the major performance aspects of the MetaRing architecture. Our results indicate that the combination of a full-duplex ring, spatial reuse, and a simple and reliable fairness mechanism of the MetaRing architecture exhibit an excellent delay-throughput performance.