Delay Analysis of a Slotted Ring Medium Access Protocol

Leo Sintonen
Tampere University of Technology Software Systems Laboratory P.O.B.553,33101 Tampere, Finland lsi@cs .tut. fi (Internet)
Abstract.
An approximate delay analysis of a slotted ring medium accessprotocol is represented. The operation is based on a continuouss t " of slots circulating around the ring. The delay model is represented. Assuming that a slot is reserved with a preassumed probability,an expression for the z- transform of the number waiting in the queue is derived by using the embedded technique. From this the expression for the averageaccess delay is obtained. The approximation of the probability is then found and the average delay can be solved.The incoming traffic is assumed to be Poisson. Numerical results are discussed

the receiving station, and thus the slot need not recirculate back to the sending station. Delay model is represented,and an approximate delay analysis is performed. The queueing process is Lreated using the embedded technique. By making the service process geometric. the expression for the average access delay is obtained. The approximation of the probability is then found and the average delay can be solved.The arrival process is assumed to be Poisson. At the end of this paper some performance figures are given showing the average delay and the queueing delay of an asynchronous packet in the slotted ring access mechanism. The dependence of the delay on the operation mode and percentage of isochronous traffic are shown.

2: Delay Model.

1: Introduction.
In high-speed networking ,where the medium is divided between asynchronous and isochronous traffic, ring-type networks also have shown competitivebehaviour. A comparison of high-speed local area networks and their performance can be founde.g. in [6].Especially in high-speed metropolitan area networking, FDDI and DQDB-access protocolshave become popular, and their performance have been studied intensively [3]. [5], [7], [81. Slotted ring access method shows some similarity in operational characteristicscompared with TDMA and DQDB ,but it's performance is not so widely studied in the litterature. 'Ihe purpose of this paper is t o study the behaviour of the slotted ring typemedium accesscontrol in high-speed networking. For this purpose a type of a slottedring medium access protocol is presented and it's performance is anlyzed. The operation of the system is based on a continuous stream of slots circulating around the ring. Slots have fixed lenght. Slots carry both types of traffic. W O operational modes are considered a "normal" mode and a reuse mode, where a slot can be reused after a message is removed by
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The components of the arrival process are depicted in Fig.1.

Flg.1. he arrival process.

The slot lenght is T seconds. The period between packet departures is c a l l e d cycle. Cycles are assumed t o be independent. Queue lenghtjust prior to the beginning of the n:th cycle is denoted by 4 , . Slots are empty with probability p,

and it takes n slots to send a packet. The time between the moment of arrivalof the tagged packet and the event of the next &parture is denoted by w. The queue disciplineis FCFS.Thus the delay of the tagged packet becomes:
Delay = {residual cycle time} + { time to sendframes ahead of the taggedframe in the queue} + { sending time of the tagged frame}

3: The queue length.

3.1: Generating function of the queue length.
T o determine the averageaccess time, t h e queue length is first calculated. The arrival process is described in Fig.1. The equation of the process is:

It will be assumed, that thwe sending time of a packet equals slot time. Probability P[empty slot] = p . r= l-p. The probability that the total service time of a packet (n-1 reserved slots, 1 slot for packet transmission) is n slots becomes:
f = (l-p)"-'p

In equation (3,

(2)

and v is the number arrived during the cycle. The arrival process is clearly a semi-Markovprocess.Taking z- transform of both sides of ( 5 ) gives:
Qn+l(Z)

The first two moments off are:

= E { z q m + l }= E { ~ ~ ~ - ~ ~ ~ + ~
= E { 2") E { zqn-A '"}

1 E(n) = - = p
P

2-P E(n2) = P2

(3)

It is assumed, that the number arrived during a service cycle is independent of the queue lentgh a t the beginning of the cycle. Further

It is assumed, that the arrival processes are independent Poisson. A station is served a t a rate determinedby the distribution (2). A station thus sees the system as a M/G/lqueueing system. The access delay is:
D = w+W,+T
(4)

Solving f "equations (7)-(9) yields in steady state:

where w is the time from the arrival of the tagged packet to the next & p a " , which happenswhen the next empty slot comes. Wq is the time to wait in the queue for the sending of all packets arrivedbefore the tagged packet, and T is the time t o send one packet. We are interestedin the averageof (4) In the following, we calculate the average term Wq by using the M/G/l- technique and the service time distribution (2). The term w is then t r e a t e d separately.The averages obtained are then added to give B.

By the use of the normalizing condition

P ( q = 0) = 1 - V ( 1 ) = l - p

(11)

Substituting(1 1) into (10) gives:

where V (1) isdenotedbyp .

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3 . 2 : Number of arrivals.
The generating function ,V ( z ) , of the number of arrivals v during the seMce time of one packet is determined next. The conditional probability of k packets arriving during the service time of x slots is: This gives:

In (13). k = number of arrivals, x = service time of a message, in slots. Arrivals are Poisson-distributed ,with parameter X. O n e packet is transmitted in one slot. s : The z-transform of (13) i

V'(1) =
Let's define p=-

XT P

X T P

k=Ox= 1

R .

Taking the second derivative of (16) and evaluating it at the point z = 1gives:

=pCe-T(l-*)x (1 - p y
x=1

By substituting (16) into (12), differentiating and evaluating a t point z= 1(by applying L'Hospital's rule twice) we get :
P2(2-P) el<l> = p + 2(1-p)

= q

The result (23) can also be obtained by using the fact that The z-transform of the number of arrivals during the service period of a frame is:
-XT(l-z)

+(1) = E { v 2 } - E { v }

(23)

V(2) =

pe -XT( 1- 2) 1- (1-p)e

(16)

4: Approximation of p.
Let M be the number of stations in the ring. If slots are reserved with probability r, this means t h a t the utilization factor of the ring as seen by the tagged station is r, so that we can equate:
M- 1

We can check that the normalization condition holds

p = 1- x p i :
r=l

Expected number o f arrivals during the service period is calculated using the first derivative of V ( z ) :

where for each individual station: p. = ' c

Xi

If slotscan be reused by the station,the probabilityp can be approximatedas follows: Probabilityof station i sending to Station j is p', and it is assumed, that every station sends with equal probability to every other station in the ring. Thus p'=l/M-l, M=number of stations in the ring. The reference station is i. Next station down can not send reserved slots passing station i (station sends not to itsem. Average number of stations traversed by a reserved slot is:

uted variables 111:

From (29) we can get for the generatingfunction of the delay distribution the compound distribution:

Where The probability that a random station sees the slot reserved by station i to pass as reserved is thus (IW)/M = lL2. Hence the probabilityof a slot noticed as flee by a random station
2'

F(2)

(31)

is:
M-1

Expression for Q , (z) can be found f r o m (12) by using the properties of txansforms. W e also note, that
I F ( z ) l 1111,wheneverlzl 1 1 1 1

C
p = '"-I
2

pli

(27)

(32)

WhereM#2.

5: Access Delay.
Equation for the access delay is given in (4). From this, the average access delay becomes:

The average service time of the queued packets can be found by using the generatingfunction (30). It can alsobe found directly by applying Little's result to (22). W e get:
(33)

w+W,+T

In (33). p is defined in(20) and p is given in (24) and in (27) for the slot reuse made.

The term w is sum of two random variables: the time from the arrival of the packet to the end of the slot plus the remaining service time in slots of the packet under service.

5.2: Average waiting time.

The average waiting time W consists of two components: 1) the averageremaining service time of packet, for which we get the solution in slots, and 2) the average remaining service time of a slot, which is TD. The random variable of the remaining service time of a packet is denotedby wp.T h e generating function of the ditributionof wp can be found by using the generating function equation for r e c m n t events [11 .From this we can derive the expression for the generatingfunction of wp :

5.1: Average queueing time.

In the previouscalculationwe inspected the queue length at the beginning of the service cycle. This was the basic assumption concerningthe Markov madel. It is proven in [2], that the solution at these moments of time is valid for all times. Thus we can assume, that the the number of packets in the system at the moment of arrival of the tagged packet can be obtainedfrom (12), and is denoted by qr .The access delay distributionis denoted by d, the service time distribution by d, ,and theservice time distributionof the queue by d, .Let's denote the number in queue by q k . The service time of each individualpacket is denoted by f, and is defined in (2). The distribution of the service time of the queue is then the k-fold convolution of k identicallydistrib335

WP(Z) = P(1-4

l-F(z)

(34)

where p is the first moment of the service time of one h e , f, given in (2). From (34) the average Fpcan be obtained:

(35)
The generatingfunction of D of the access delay can be obtained by the help of generating functions (30) and ( 3 4 ) .

lay depends also of the token rotation time and the ring latency.

7: Conclusions.
A new slotted ring medium access protocol for highspeed networks is outlined. A new approach to approximate the average access delay of slotted ring operation is represented. Expressionsfor the distribution and average of the queue length and the access delay are derived. T h e approach developed here can be used to approximate the access delay also in the case of asymmetric loads. Numerical results show, t h a t the accessdelay of a slotted ring with both isochronous and asynchronous traffic is comparable to that of the DQDB bus and shorter than that Of FDDI- ring. It is shown, that Slot ELEXdecreases access delay significantlywhen the load is high.

5.3 :Average access delay.

From (35) we get, by adding the second component, an expression for W.By substitutingthis result and equation(33) into (a), we get the expression for the average access delay:

5.4: Access delay and different traffic types.

It is assumed, that the system can transmit both isochronous and a s y n m n m traffic. Let the percentage of bandwidth allocatedfor isochronous traffic be q.The remaining bandwidth for asynchronous traffic is then 1-q percent

References.
[l] W.Feller An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, Wiley, 1950.
[2] L.Kleinrock: QueueingSystems, Vol.l.,Wiley.1975.

6: Results.
The average access delay vs. the utilization factor p is depicted in fig.2. Utilization factor p is the total incoming traffic to the stations normalized to the ring capacity. The access delay is n o d to slot time. In Fig.2. there is only asynchronous traffic. The access delay is considerablesmaller, if slots are reused Fig. 3. shows the performance of the system, when 50%of capacity is m v e d for isochronous traffic. In Figd. the performance is plotted vs. different % remaining for asynchronous traffic. The traffic is normalized to the bandwidth available for asynchronous traflic in the 50% case. The curves show the sensitivity of the delay to the decrease in bandwidth. FigS. shows the queueing delay with different 96 of bandwidth available for asynchronous load. The queueing delay in this case is the time from the moment of arrival of the tagged packet to the departm of the last packet in queue before the tagged packet. The slotted mechanism described here shows similarity t o the slotted system of dqdbbus (one bus) 131, except the reservation mechanism. In the dqdb-bus,however, the access delay is sensitiveto the position o f the station. This can also happen in slottedring, in slot reusemode, if the load is asymmetric. This caseis not analyzed here. The slouedring has considerablyshorter access delay than fddi- ring*as reported e.g. in [8], because in th e case of fddi, the access de336

[3] P.Tran-Cia, TILStock ApproximatePerformance. Analysis of the DQDB Acess Protocol.Computer Networks and ISDN SystemS. B(1990). 231-240.
[4] H.W.Lee, L.Liang: A Generalized Analysis of Message

delay in STDMA, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 19(1990). 11-24. [5] C.C.Bisdikian: Waiting T i e Analysis in a Single Buffer DQDB (802.6) network. IEEEJoumalon Selected Areas in c t . 1990. Communications.Vo1.8. No. 8. O [6] B.W.Abeysundara, A.E.Kamal: High-speed Local Area Networks and Their Performance A Survey, ACM Computing Surveys, Vo1.23. No.2, June 1991. [7] R.O.Lamaire, An M/G/l vacation Model of an FDDI Station,IEEE J. on Sel. Areas in CO.. W.9, N0.2. February 1991. [8] M.Tangemann,K.Sauec Performance Analysis of the T i i d Tokm Protocol of FDDI and FDDI -II, IEEE J. on Sel. Areas in Comm.. Vo1. 9. N0.2. February 1991.

12
10

1
-

mode 1

0 D-

4-

201

0.1

0.2

0 . 3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

utilization factor

Fig.2. Average access delay as a function of utilization. Mode 2 = slot reuse mode.

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

,.1

relatke utilization factor

Fig.3. Average access delay as a function of relative utilization. q = % of isochronous load.

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25

20

10

/-

==-z =---:z r,.-. -. -. e---

0 . 1

0 . 2

03

0 . 4

0 . 5

0 . 6

0.7

0 . 8

0 . 9

relatkc utilization fnctor

Fig.4. Access delay as a function of available bandwidth. p% of bandwidth for asynchronous load.

I
12
0

p-50%

/
I

0 . 1

0 . 2

0 . 3

0 . 4

0 . 5

0 . 6

0 . 7

0 . 8

0 . 9

relatke utilization foctor

FigS. Average queueing delay, when p% of bandwidth is reserved for asynchronous load.

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