Performance study of ACTA as an efficient high speed multi-channel integrated services network

ACTA (adaptive cycle tunable access) has been proposed for a high speed multimedia network. It is a simple multi-channel network protocol suitable for photonic implementation. It adopts a slotted cycle to transmit packets and the cycle length is dynamically adjusted according to the network load. We study the performance of the ACTA protocol both for single-channel and multi-channel integrated services operations. Through the simulations, we have shown that the overhead of channel tuning is quite small. We also study the priority mechanism of ACTA, and analyze the relation between the node transmission quota and bandwidth allocation. In addition, we present a slot reuse scheme which requires only one additional access control bit, and demonstrate great improvement in network utilization. The simulation results show that ACTA network is a very promising candidate for the future high speed multimedia networks.