Future metropolitan area networks (MANs) will need a shared-medium backbone with capacity up to many gigabits per second to support the communication requirements of large numbers of users over distances of hundreds of kilometers. Efficient medium access control protocols for this future MAN environment are needed. The authors introduce and analyze a new protocol for unidirectional bus networks, in which bandwidth allocation and access fairness are adaptively controlled by the head end of the bus on the basis of traffic measurements. The proposed protocol can control the admitted traffic of a particular type to a desired fraction of the bus capacity and at the same time enforce access fairness faster than other existing protocols, such as the one used in the recently approved IEEE 802.6 MAN standard.
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