Low complexity distributed bandwidth allocation for resilient packet ring networks

The resilient packet ring (RPR), defined under IEEE 802.17, has been proposed as a high-speed backbone technology for metropolitan area networks. RPR is introduced to mitigate the underutilization and unfairness problems associated, respectively, with the current SONET and Ethernet technologies. The key performance objectives of RPR are to achieve high bandwidth utilization, optimum spatial reuse on the dual rings, and fairness. The challenge is to design an algorithm that can react dynamically to the traffic in achieving these objectives. Previous attempts have critical limitations, such as oscillation of the allocated bandwidth or high computational complexity. We propose the low complexity distributed bandwidth allocation (LCDBA) algorithm to allocate bandwidth fairly to RPR nodes with a very low computational complexity, O(1). It converges to the exact max-min fairness in a few round trip times with no oscillation at the steady state.