In: IEEE Transactions on Reliability, vol. 42, no. 1, pages 116-127. March 1993.
Abstract: CSMA/CD networks have gained widespread acceptance for use in many application areas. However, a barrier to their acceptance for industrial use has been the non-deterministic nature of the collision-resolution scheme employed in the standard variants (Ethernet and IEEE 802.3) of the protocol. Alternative schemes, which have a deterministically bounded collision-resolution time, have been proposed. These deterministic schemes typically work by partitioning the network nodes into groups, which may transmit during particular time periods after a collision is detected. The limit, in which each node is in its own group, has been implemented, but has not been evaluated in the presence of transient faults to determine if it offers any significant advantage over the standard exponential binary backoff algorithm. This is important in an industrial environment, where noise may significantly affect protocol operation. This paper presents the results of such an evaluation f! or the CSMA/CD protocol and a deterministic protocol under workloads anticipated in an industrial environment. Stochastic activity networks are used as the model type, and simulation is used as the solution method. The results show that the preferred resolution scheme depends on the level of workload anticipated and whether transient faults may occur.
Keywords: CSMA/CD protocol, Deterministic collision resolution (DCR), Performability, Stochastic activity networks (SANs), Stochastic Petri nets.