A Class of Fiber-Ribbon Pipeline Ring Networks for Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems

In this paper, three ring networks made up of fiberribbon point-to-point links are presented. The first network is a control-channel based network in which one fiber in each link joins with others to form a controlchannel ring. This ring improves performance of the network by sending medium access control information immediately before the data transmissions. High throughputs can be achieved in the network due to pipelining, i.e., several packets can be traveling through the network simultaneously but in different segments of the ring. Also, real-time demands can be met using slot reserving. The network, called CC-FPR (Control-Channel based Fiber-ribbon Pipeline Ring), can be built today using off-the-shelf fiber-optic components. The increasingly good price/performance ratio for fiberribbon links indicates a high potential for the success of the proposed kind of networks. The second network is similar to the first one except that it divides the network into two sub-networks, one for packet switched traffic and one for circuit -switched traffic. When the main data flow in the network does not change rapidly, this is a good choice of a simple but powerful network. In the third network, the medium access protocol of the first network is exchanged with a one with global deadline scheduling to support best-effort real-time traffic.