Gigabit Network Multicast Protocols

This Ph.D. dissertation investigates protocols for a gigabit-per-second local-area network (LAN) as the successor to the first generation of 10 Mbit/s Ethernet and Token Ring LANs, and the second and current generation of 100 Mbit/s Fast Ethernet, FDDI, DQDB-MANs and 155 Mbit/s ATM networks. The communication medium of gigabit networks has the characteristics of an ultra-high data rate and an extremely low error rate. The design of the medium access control (MAC) mechanisms for the QuickRing gigabit LAN of this work not only exploits these characteristics to achieve high throughput and low latency, but also provides integrated support for the increasingly higher quality of service (QoS) demanded by the network applications. In the proposed MAC scheme, the fundmental communication mode is one-to-many or many-to-many multicast, which supports group communication as well as point-to-point unicast and broadcast. Based on this, a suite of MAC protocols has been developed to provide integrat..