Fibre-optic local-area network with arbitrary topology

The lack of satisfactory passive connectors, of standardisation in fibre-optic devices and the unidirectional light transmission employed in most fibre links prohibits the direct translation of networking techniques from the better developed wire or cable systems. A point-to-point network with nodes connected in an arbitrary fashion can provide an ideal solution to these problems while maintaining high network reliability and permitting easy reconfiguration, but has associated problems in the routing of the data. A possible solution is to use the flood routing technique as proposed by Neff and Senzig in their Anarchy network. Unfortunately, this network exhibits very low channel utilisation and has packet looping problems. In the paper we discuss methods of removing the looping problem and then propose a modified Anarchy flood routing (MAFR) protocol, for which a simplified performance analysis and simulation studies indicate that better network performance can be achieved with little additional hardware. However, we believe that a hybrid flood routing scheme (HFR) involving MAFR and a virtual circuit approach will produce a better system.