A comparison of the FDDI fibre optic network with the emerging IEEE 802.6 metropolitan area network

By simulating both networks with the same physical layer data rate it has been shown that the maximum throughput of both networks is adversely affected by the presence of a high proportion of short packets in the traffic and that this effect is greater in the IEEE 802.6 network. It has also been demonstrated that the access delay of an IEEE 802.6 network is not significantly changed by an increased in network size. When compared with FDDI, which shows increasing access delay and reduction in available bandwidth as the network size is increased, it is clear that the IEEE 802.6 network protocol would exhibit superior performance for a large network backbone when compared with an FDDI network at the same data rate. For the smaller network, both networks exhibit low access delays, but an FDDI network operating with dual active rings would provide more available bandwidth