Analysis of tuning of FDDI media access control protocol

The fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) provides a 100 Mb/s communication system to interconnect computer and peripheral equipment using fiber optics as the transmission medium in a ring configuration. The performance of the FDDI media-access control (MAC) protocol, a timed-token protocol, is analyzed. The FDDI MAC priority mechanism supports two classes of traffic: synchronous and asynchronous. The focus is on the relationship between the FDDI MAC parameter settings, the ring configuration, and the performance of the asynchronous priority levels. A procedure to calculate estimates for the throughput of each asynchronous priority level over a range of frame-arrival rates is developed. Performance results are presented to demonstrate characteristics of the FDDI priority mechanism. A procedure is described that can be used to tune the FDDI parameters so that given performance objectives for the various priority levels are achieved.>