A dynamic high speed multi-media local area network (MLAN) protocol architecture

The design of a multimedia LAN (MLAN) protocol using a broadcast bus system topology suitable for a campus environment is considered. It minimizes the bus access time by using an advanced reservation technique, and accommodates requests for several packet sizes expressed in multiples of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) cell size. The architecture presented assumes a MLAN speed of 50 Mb/s, and can be easily extended to the STS-3 signal bit rate of 150 Mb/s. The bus access techniques, bandwidth allocation for various types of traffic, clock synchronization, etc. are monitored and changed/adjusted dynamically according to traffic conditions on the bus.<
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