A steady state bound for resilient packet rings

Resilient packet ring (RPR) is a new technology being standardized in the IEEE 802.17 working group. The paper presents the performance of 1TB-RPR, a proposal made to the working group. 1TB-RPR deploys a rate-based fairness algorithm rather than the quota-based algorithm that has been widely used in legacy ring schemes. This fairness algorithm significantly reduces access delays under steady state and allows RPR to be scalable in today´s MAN/WAN environments. A ring access delay bound under steady state is given. The bound is then proved using both analytical and simulation approaches. Furthermore, we show that the bound is tight by constructing a worst-case traffic scenario. It is shown that straight overloading scenarios may not be the worst case.