Performance analysis of a new bandwidth balancing mechanism under the presence of erasure nodes

The No Slot Wasting Bandwidth Balancing (NSW BWD) mechanism has been recently proposed for dual bus architectures. NSW BWD provides throughput fairness and arbitrary bandwidth distribution without wasting channel slots. Consequently it can use a small value for the bandwidth balancing modulus M and converge faster to the steady state than the current Bandwidth Balancing mechanism of DQDB (BWD DQDB). In this paper we investigate, through simulation, the performance of two variations of NSW DWB in the presence of erasure nodes and under one or multiple priority classes of traffic. For both variations, we examine the effect of the erasure node locations on the throughputs of the various stations, as well as priority classes of traffic, and compare the performance of NSW BWB with the corresponding performance of BWD DQDB. Our simulation results reveal some very interesting properties for the first of the two NSW BWD variations which enable us to derive analytic estimates of its throughput performance in the general case of arbitrary number of stations and arbitrary location of erasure nodes.