The adaptive cycle cell insertion MAC protocol for high throughput and fair multiaccess networks

This paper deals with a MAC protocol suitable for data traffic in a twin bus high speed LAN/MAN. Its main features are the possibility of distributed buffering of the information units propagating along the busses and a decentralized traffic-adaptive access-cycle mode of operation. These features ensure both high throughput-delay performance and fair resource sharing. A complete description of the ACCI protocol is given, with and without prioritized traffic handling. The performance evaluation is obtained by simulation. It mainly focuses on a LAN interconnection scenario, representing a bursty traffic environment, where the backbone network adopts the ACCI protocol. The results suggest that, to reach a performance close to the theoretical limits, LAN frames should be transmitted by individual cells rather than by contiguous cells. Moreover, considerable insight is gained in the network buffers dimensioning. © 1994.