ON SOME SIMULATION STUDIES OF ETHERNET

Abstract

Ethernet is a popular bus LAN designed by the Xerox Corporation mainly to handle bursty traffic'. A consequence of bursty traffic is that among a finitely large population of network users, at any one time only a small number of them have data to send. In this environment, the performance of an access protocol for a broadcast network depends mainly on how quickly one of the ready users can be identified and given sole access to the shared channel. Ethernet employs C SMA/ CD to manage access to the channel. This dissertation is an attempt at examining the possibility of replacing CSMV- CD by same other protocol, for better performance'. CSMA/CD is a contention protocol; hence, CSMA/CA, another contention protocol and Token passing, a reservation protocol have been chosen as the potential substitutes. The performance comparision has been made through simulation'. A functional model for each of the protocols has been constructed; a performance model has also been designed for gathering .statistics, to evaluate the performance of each protocol. The model 'has been simulated in Algol on D: C-2050. Several simulation runs were made, data was collected, and the results were analysed to compare the behaviour of each of the protocols.