Optimal message flow on ring networks with spatial reuse

The problem of message exchange in ring structured communication networks is considered, where the network architecture allows connections between several nodes to be concurrently established, as long as their communication paths do not overlap on the ring. That is, spatial reuse of the ring is exercised, in the sense that disjoint segments of the ring can be used concurrently. Temporally and spatially colliding transmissions are always unsuccessful; therefore, a transmission control policy is needed to prevent collisions utilizing some reservation scheme, and also to guarantee the highest possible throughput, fairness, reliability, etc. If transmission of a message has to be delayed upon its arrival to the source node, it is then queued up in a buffer. The authors focus on transmission control policies that use minimal information about the state of the network to structure the message flows, so as to maximize the overall throughput and guarantee relative fairness in the utilization of the ring by all the source-destination pairs