Enhancements of DQDB protocol with ECBWB mechanism for fair access and multi-priority traffic management

The Distributed Queue Dual Bus (DQDB) protocol with BandWidth Balancing (BWB) mechanism is unable to effectively support multiple priority levels that may be necessary for providing new services to network users. Thus, fair allocation of bandwidth among users is assured only in the case of one level of traffic priority. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel mechanism called Extended Counting BandWidth Balancing (ECBWB), which augments and enhances the operation of the current BWB mechanism. Simulation results, obtained under particularly severe traffic overload conditions, show that the proposed mechanism has better performance but minimal added complexity with respect to the current version of the protocol