Browsing by Author "Patten, Terry"

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    The flooding sink: a new approach to local area networking
    (1983-05-01) Patten, Terry; Hutchinson, Norm; Unger, Brian W
    A new local area networking technology is presented. The approach is based on an old routing algorithm called flooding - forward messages to all neighboring nodes. The problem with this algorithm is that the network is deluged with duplicate messages. The solution is a simple device which uses local memory to detect and ignore redundant messages, thus also acting as a message sink. Networks based on this device are shown to be more flexible and realiable than current networks. Flooding also has the advantage that any messages lost due to transmission errors are quickly replaced by one of the copies. This makes much of the usual low-level 'hand-shake' protocols unnecessary. When the low-level protocols are omitted, significant performance improvements are achieved. Simulation results are presented which show that this flooding technology performs better than current CSMA and ring technologies.
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    A new approach to industrial local computer networking
    (1982-03-01) Patten, Terry; Hutchinson, Norman; Unger, Brian W
    A unique local message node interface and its application to industrial environments is described. A typical application is the monitoring and control of manufacturing plant equipment located in several adjacent buildings. The approach can provide a low cost, high speed network which is highly reliable and adaptable to changing requirements. Currently, simple network configurations such as contention networks, stars, or rings are often used to avoid complicated message routing algorithms. In this paper, we solve the routing problem with a simple hardware mechanism which implements the "flooding" algorithm. This hardware mechanism acts as a universal local network node interface that can be used to construct high speed networks of arbitrary connectivity.