What is the performance of ethernet and token ring under light traffic load?


Ethernet is a way of connecting computers together in LAN, it is the most widely used method of linking computers together in LANs. The basic idea of its design is that multiple computers have access to it and can send data at any time.

Token Ring is also a computer networking technology which is used to build local area networks where all stations are connected in a ring topology and pass one or more tokens for channel acquisition.

Ethernet

The performance of Ethernet under light traffic load is explained below in stepwise manner −

Step 1 − Ethernet is a computer networking technology which uses carrier sense, multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD).

Step 2 − It is mostly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN).

Step 3 − Ethernet uses a bus network topology network where all nodes share a common bus and at a time only one node can communicate.

Step 4 − Data frames contain source and destination addresses and every node monitors the bus and copies frames addressed to it.

Step 5 − The transmission rate of Ethernet is generally 10 Mbps over a coaxial line, even though some networks allow bit rates of 100 Mbps.

Step 6 − A sender node must wait for an idle condition to transmit its message. It monitors the bus to determine if it is busy.

Step 7 − A collision happens when two stations attempt to transmit at the same time. As a result of collision, the transmitted data got corrupted, and it is required to re-transmit.

Step 8 − The lost data and re-transmission reduces throughput. And in a worst-case excessive collision can reduce throughput drastically.

Step 9 − A collision-based network theoretically becomes unstable under loads as low as 37% of nominal capacity.

Step 10 − So, performance of the Ethernet degrades with heavy traffic. Under the light traffic, as there is a less chance of collision, the Ethernet throughput becomes high. But if the network traffic is high, the probability of occurrence of a collision also becomes high. S0, the performance of Ethernet decreases in a high traffic loaded network.

Token Ring

The performance of token ring under light traffic load is explained below in stepwise manner −

Step 1 − Token Ring is a computer networking technology which uses IEEE 802.5 (ISO 8802.5) and where a number of stations are connected by transmission links in a ring topology.

Step 2 −The data flows in one direction along the ring from source to destination and back to source.

Step 3 − A sender node which is wishing to transmit the data to a destination node waits for a token. When it gets the token, it fills a frame with data and adds the source and destination addresses and sends it to the next node.

Step 4 − The data frame then circulates around the network until it reaches the destination node. When it reaches the destination node, the destination node then reads the data into its local memory area and marks an acknowledgement on the data frame. This then circulates back to the source node.

Step 5 − When the source node receives the frame it checks it to determine if it contains an acknowledgement. If it does then the source node knows that the data frame was received correctly, else the node is not responding. If the source node has finished transmitting data then it transmits a new token, which can be used by other nodes on the ring.

Step 6 − Token ring is well suited to networks which have large amounts of traffic. The main advantage of it is that it copes better with high traffic rates than Ethernet because it is a collision free protocol. With light traffic (ρ <0.5) a node may keep the token much longer than when there is heavy traffic. Under light load, a delay is added due to waiting for the token and the average delay is one half ring propagation times.

Updated on: 11-Sep-2021

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