An integrated services protocol for Ethernets

A new integrated services protocol is proposed for Ethernets to support synchronous traffic (e.g. voice) in addition to data traffic. The new protocol is compatible with the Ethernet protocol in the sense that data stations may use existing Ethernet adapters while voice stations can be supported by adding new adapters. The protocol allows voice stations to have a higher channel access priority than data stations, and by using two counters to record the number of active voice stations, the protocol can avoid the contention among the voice stations. Given that existing Ethernets have only 5 to 10% utilization, the authors show that the spare capacity of Ethernet is sufficient for supporting more than 100 active voice stations without any degradation of the data delay performance