A hardware support system will be provided for research in the fields of communication protocols and local area networks. The workstations for this project are all rackmountable SUN-2/170's. The SUN-2 master provides the main user interface applications such as controlling and monitoring. Extensions to the existing VAX11/750 are required to connect into the backbone Ethernet Laboratory equipment to test custom hardware for node controllers, and a channel evaluation is requested. The Quad-Node SUN-2 host is required to add a cluster of four nodes and their channel emulator to the facility. Start-up studies using the facility would deal with performance evaluation and comparison of existing Local Area Network protocols, such as CSMA/CD and Token Ring, which are relatively well understood. It is planned to study traffic integration, the ISDN S-interface Passive Bus and Extended Passive Bus, and preliminaries of Metropolitan Area Networks. Additional research would address bandwidth allocation problems on an optical network (using scaling), double counter-rotating ring architectures, and construction of future ISDN local loop.
