A fair management of communication establishment for a ring LAN

The authors describe a ring local area network (LAN), where medium access is executed by a register insertion technique. The circulation of a temporal reference provides an original method of time management. A date allocated to each communication establishment requests is used to establish the data links according to their age. This reference gives an answer to request collision problems. These dates are managed through a distributed queue, assuring a global fairness on the network. Modeling of the global state of the network allows the evaluation of the parameters in critical cases. It is concluded that the proposed network is suited to real-time industrial applications, and offers all the services defined by the Open Systems Interconnection model for data link level