Performance comparison of a class of slotted ring networks

Much has been previously written about the performance of slotted ring networks. However, the results are not appropriate to apply for the new generation slotted rings, like counter-rotating multichannel slotted rings. In this paper, a novel technique for quantitative measurement of average transfer delay of a class of slotted rings is presented. The approach is expanded to compare the average transfer delay of various slotted rings including counter-rotating multichannel slotted ring networks. An extensive simulation study has been carried out to verify the derived analytical results. The analytical results show an excellent agreement with simulation results over a broad range of parameters. The average transfer delay of the counter-rotating slotted ring network is about half that of the conventional multichannel slotted rings. Spatial reuse using the counter-rotating channel configuration also increases the effective ring throughput significantly, compared to conventional simple multichannel ring networks. The results show that the major part of the cell transfer delay comes from the propagation delay from a source to a destination. It is also observed that the network throughput depends upon the aggregated transmission capacity of the network.