On the performance effects of station locations and access protocol parameters in Ethernet networks

A simulation study is presented in several distributions of stations on a linear-bus Ethernet. Aggregate performance is shown to depend on the distribution of stations. Individual station performance varies with the location of the station. Unbalanced distributions can lead to large performance differences between individual stations, with isolated stations achieving relatively poor performance compared to the average. The effects of access protocol parameters such as the number of buffers per station and the retransmission algorithm are examined. A modification of the standard retransmission algorithm is presented that enables a higher throughput to be achieved at high load. The results are compared to the predictions of theoretical models, and the applicability of the models to finite-population Ethernets is examined