Inter-ring traffic engineering for bridged IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Rings

When bridging Resilient Packet Rings, previous research have focused on how to prevent the flooding of inter-ring traffic, or traffic whose source and destination nodes are on different rings. In this paper, we propose that attention should also be paid to buffer overflow at the bridges, because packets dropped in transit will reduce the overall network performance. The reasons that make buffer overflow more likely to occur in bridged RPR networks than in other bridged networks are analyzed. The concept of global fairness for inter-ring traffic and the global fairness algorithm for implementing global fairness are proposed. Then we propose how the global fairness algorithm can be extended to successfully prevent buffer overflow from occuring. Simulation results are then presented to support our proposals.