A waste-free fairness control for rings with spatial reuse

Abstract

While spatial reuse in a high-speed ring increases the throughput performance, it leads to a fairness problem in distributing the network bandwidth among distinct nodes. To alleviate this problem, fairness control algorithms based on a packet window have been developed. Under these algorithms, satisfied nodes are forced to pass empty slots to starved downstream nodes until their windows are refilled by a reset signal. This regulation incurs a bandwidth waste corresponding to the travel distance of those empty slots. In this paper, a waste-free fairness control method based on a two-layer window composed of the cycle and packet windows is developed. Using the proposed method, packets allocated to multiple fairness cycles are simultaneously transferred and, in consequence, the otherwise wasted bandwidth can be reused to carry, in advance, packets allocated to future fairness cycles. This method is applied to two typical ring protocols with only the packet window, ATMR and MetaRing, and their performances are investigated The simulation results show that the cycle window is very effective to improve the performance of the ATMR and MetaRing protocols.