The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	A parallel processing architecture for DQDB protocol implementation
Author:	Gandhi, Nilesh Vinubhai
View Online:	njit-etd1993-083 (xx, 63 pages ~ 2.8 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Electrical Engineering
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Karvelas, Dionissios (Committee chair) Ziavras, Sotirios (Committee member) Ansari, Nirwan (Committee member)
Date:	1993-10
Keywords:	Parallel processing (Electronic computers) Computer network architectures Data compression (Telecommunication) Computer network protocols
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	The high bandwidth transmission links, which have been provided by the advances of Fiber Optics Technology, reduce drastically the packet transmission times and place new demands on the nodal protocol processing. Segmentation and reassembly of packets, computation of checksums, introduction of source and destination addresses, etc., must be performed extremely fast in order to prevent node processing from becoming the bottleneck of the transmission. Parallel processing enables the execution of the previous tasks on multiple packets simultaneously and therefore has the potential of addressing the issue of fast node processing successfully. In this thesis we focus on the Medium Access Control Protocol of the Distributed Queue Dual Bus (DQDB) which has been adopted by IEEE as the 802.6 standard for Metropolitan Area Networks (MANS). We present a parallel processing based architecture for the implementation of DQDB protocol which can satisfy its stringent processing time requirements. The architecture consists of a set of packet processors which have been provided with local memory and can be accessed according to a round robin scheduling algorithm. In this way the amount of contention in the local bus is drastically reduced and the processing performance significantly improves. Both Transmitter and Receiver design are presented.