A j-bit bus architecture for multimedia local ATM network (MLAN)

With the emerging multimedia services, there is a need to support these services in the local area environment. In the last few years, many LAN protocols have been proposed or modified to fulfill this need. One such protocol is multimedia local ATM network (MLAN) protocol that is based on the bidirectional broadcast bus topology. The MLAN, suitable for campus environment, operates in the native ATM mode and does dynamic and fair bandwidth allocation to service multimedia traffic, and, offers connectionless as well as connection oriented service for MLAN-ATM network communication. From the previously published performance results, it is clear that MLAN provides excellent performance for distances from 1 to 3 km. To support applications requiring longer distances, we propose a new j-bit bus architecture for MLAN protocol. In this architecture, a terminal does not require j separate interfaces but is attached to the j-bit bus using one parallel interface. With the j-bit bus architecture, the MLAN can be extended to many times of the original coverage, depending upon the value of j employed. The MLAN protocol's performance has been determined by computer simulation using a multimedia traffic model. Based on the results, the proposed j-bit bus MLAN architecture is well suited for designing high speed multimedia ATM LANs.