Timing properties of the timed token MAC protocol
Sijing Zhang, Alan Burns · 2002
We investigate the inherent timing properties of the timed token medium access control (MAC) protocol that are necessary for guaranteeing synchronous message deadlines in a timed token ring network such as the Fibre Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) network. As a result, the best-so-far result of the upper bound on the time possibly elapsed between any number of successive token arrivals at a particular node was derived. This result, which is particularly important for studies on real-time communications in any timed token ring network, has been published by Zhang and Burns (see IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, vol.3, p. 729-41, 1995) with no proof given. In this paper, we complement our early work by presenting a concise formal proof of this upper bound.