Control-channel based fiber-ribbon pipeline ring network

In this paper, we propose a control-channel based ring network built up of fiber-ribbon point-to-point links. One of the fibers in each link forms part of the control-channel ring, over which medium access control information is sent immediately before data transmissions. This increases performance of the network. High throughputs can be achieved in the network due to pipelining, i.e., several packets can be traveling through the network simultaneously but in different segments of the ring. The network can meet high performance demands in, e.g., massively parallel signal processing systems, which is shown by example in the paper. Also, real-time demands can be met using slot reserving. The network, called CCFPR (Control-Channel based Fiber-ribbon Pipeline Ring), can be built today, using fiber-optic off-the-shelf components, and a prototype is currently under development. The increasingly good price/performance ratio for fiber-ribbon links indicates a great success potential for the proposed kind of network.