Is there life beyond linear topologies? A comparison of DQDB and the Manhattan street network

The performance and reliability comparison of two networks that have been proposed for use as high-speed metropolitan area networks (MANs)-the Manhattan street network (MS Net) and the distributed-queue dual-bus (DQDB) network-are compared. Both networks use slotted access protocols and have the same number of links, transmitters, and receivers per node. It is shown that the MS Net provides a much higher network throughput for a variety of traffic patterns, both uniform and nonuniform. It is shown that the MS Net can survive more failures than the DQDB network and that failures cause a lesser performance degradation in the MS Net. It is also shown that higher-level mechanisms are required in the DQDB network to recover from link failures, whereas deflection routing is sufficient in the MS Net