The design principles of a ring network with spatial bandwidth reuse are described. A distributed fairness mechanism for this architecture, which uses low latency hardware control signals, is presented. The basic fairness mechanism can be extended for implementing multiple priority levels and integration of asynchronous with synchronous traffic. The ring is full-duplex and has two basic modes of operation: buffer insertion mode for variable-size packets and slotted mode for fixed-size packets or cells. Concurrent access and spatial reuse allow simultaneous transmissions over disjoint segments of a bidirectional ring and can increase the effective throughput by a factor of four or more. The combination of a full-duplex ring, spatial reuse, a reliable fairness mechanism, and the exploitation of advent in fiber-optic technology are the basis for the MetaRing network architecture.
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