Design and performance evaluation of a new spatial reuse FireWire protocol

Building large-scale video surveillance systems is of importance to national security. To support economical installation of video cameras, there is a need for new shared-medium protocols. This paper describes the new spatial reuse FireWire protocol (SFP). SFP is a bus arbitration protocol for an acyclic daisy-chained network topology. SFP is an extension of IEEE 1394b FireWire. SFP preserves the simple repeat path functionality of FireWire while offering two significant advantages: (1) SFP supports spatial reuse of bandwidth in order to increase effective throughput; and (2) SFP provides support for priority traffic to be able to support real-time applications (e.g., video) and data traffic. Simulation results show that for a uniform traffic pattern, SFP improves upon the throughput of IEEE 1394b by a factor of 1.7. For a traffic pattern typical of video surveillance applications, throughput increases by a factor of 6.8.