Effective priority mechanism for high speed MANs

In this paper, we introduce a very effective priority mechanism for high speed DQDB type Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs). The proposed mechanism can be applied to either of the two (recently proposed) variations of the No Slot Wasting Bandwidth Balancing mechanism and enables high priority traffic to have almost immediate access to the transmission medium; regardless of the presence of low priority traffic. We use simulation results to investigate the delay performance of the proposed priority mechanism in the case of three classes of traffic. Furthermore, we compare its performance with the corresponding performance of other (previously proposed) priority mechanisms. Finally, we examine its ability to support real-time traffic such as voice and video.