Modeling and Analysis of Multi-Access Mechanisms in SUPERLAN

Today, new multi-Gbps LANs are designed to support a wide range of applications generating isochronous and nonisochronous traffic at arbitrary bit rates. The growing demand for high bandwidth networking, under increasing performance constraints, has posed fundamental challenges to LAN design and implementation. Three fundamental bottlenecks exist in a multi-Gbps LAN environment that must be handled in order to achieve optimal performance. These are: opto-electronic bottleneck, service bottleneck, and processing bottleneck. A novel architectural solution is proposed to open up these bottlenecks. Total network throughput of about 20 Gbps is achievable. Performance modeling, analysis and evaluation is reported for a class of Medium Access Protocols (MAC) for isochronous traffic. The performance results show good and very good performance for this solution