STUDY OF CONCURRENT BROADCAST IN LANS

Abstract

The present day LAN design is based on a simple linear topology such as ring or bus and is based primarily on broadcast protocols, that is each node can observe the transmission of all other nodes. In LANs, the worst case scenario is always considered, where at any given time, each user may want to transmit to any other user or even broadcast to all other users. Reservation management, in which every pair of nodes is assigned a connection with a given bandwidth, can be used to solve this problem, but, this results in an inefficient operation, as each connection is assigned only a fraction of the bandwidth. To improve the efficiency of LANs, it is prudent to replace the broadcast routing paradigm with the spatial bandwidth reuse paradigm, which allows for concurrent transmissions. In this dissertation, two broadcast algorithms, namely complete broadcast and inininium broadcast algorithms are simulated on arbitrary topology networks. These networks simulate a local area network with arbitrary topology, that provide for spatial band width reuse and are termed as "Metanet". On the underlying network, two types of rings, namely simple embedded ring and tree embedded ring are formed. The performance of the two broadcast algorithms on tree embedded ring under varying load conditions are compared. Besides, the performance of the network with the variation in the size and topology of the network is also evaluated.