In dual unidirectional bus networks, packets usually occupy fixed-length slots form the sending station to the end of the network. An erasure node is a specialized station which recognizes packets which have passed their destination stations and releases the slots for subsequent use. The authors derive the optimal locations for erasure nodes and show analytically, for uniform traffic, that only several erasure nodes are needed to achieve throughput close to twice the nominal network bandwidth. The results are tested by simulation of the DQDB (distributed queue dual bus) protocol, which demonstrates a realistic improvement of 40% with only three erasure nodes. Fair access among the stations is improved as well. The authors generalize the analytic results by providing an algorithm for determining the optimal erasure node locations and the throughput improvement, given any arbitrary traffic pattern. The application of this methodology to the related problem of bridged subnetworks is briefly discussed.
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