Design and analysis of a pipeline ring protocol

A new distributed protocol which supports concurrent message transmissions on different ring segments in a ring network is proposed. This protocol allows the destination station to remove the message body from the ring and to issue a new token for the succeeding stations to establish another transmission in the remaining ring segment. This protocol requires only one-bit latency at each station and supports variable size messages. We derived the maximum throughput of the pipeline ring and found it to be heavily dependent on the message size distribution. The maximum throughput of a single ring for exponential messages and fixed size messages are 1.23 and 1.68 respectively; while for the double ring, the per-ring throughput is 1.7 and 3.25 respectively. Due to analytical complexity, the delay performance is obtained by simulation. Two service disciplines are compared. It is found that the furthest within segment (FWS) discipline always performs better than the first come first serve (FCFS) discipline. The short message transmission scheme is introduced. Under bimodal traffic, it can significantly increase the ring efficiency