The location of stations on the buses can not be ignored in the analysis of the DQDB protocol, especially when traffic load is heavy. In this paper, we propose a new method to model the DQDB (Distributed Queue Dual Bus) protocol by assuming that the request arrival process depends on both the value of the request counter and the location of a station on the buses. By taking these dependences, we can catch the real behavior of the DQDB stations, which is locationally dependent and unfair under heavy load traffic. Based on this model, we analyze the DQDB system with finite buffer by considering the request counter states and buffer states separately and obtain the throughput, mean packet delay and packet reject probability of individual stations. The throughput in individual stations matches that of simulation very well within the range of traffic up to the channel capacity. Also the delay and packet reject rate performance is good up to moderate traffic load. These numerical results reveal the properties of the location dependence and the unfairness of DQDB system under heavy load condition. The analytic results under heavy load traffic for a general DQDB system has not been reported till now. Therefore we conclude that our model and analysis are valid and effective.

The Distributed Queue Dual Bus protocol (DQDB) has been adopted as the metropolitan area network (MAN) standard by IEEE802.6 committee. Recently, the unfairness problem in the DQDB protocol, by which head stations benefit, has been pointed out. Although a fair bandwidth distribution among the stations is obtained by adding the so-called bandwidth balancing mechanism into the DQDB protocol (DQDB/BB), the DQDB/BB protocol leaves a portion of the available bandwidth unused, and it takes a considerable amount of time to converge to fair channel assignment. In this study, to overcome the drawbacks in DQDB and DQDB/BB, we introduce a new media access control protocol which is based on assigning each station a level according to some traffic information such as the queueing length, delay time etc. Only the station with the highest level is allowed to transmit. Through the operation of level assignment or the choice of level function, the transmission can be easily controlled in a distributed manner. This protocol is simple compared with DQDB/BB and can be implemented in the DQDB architecture. The simulation results show that the new protocol obtains not only fair throughput regardless of the distance between the stations, but also fair delay performance. In addition, the new protocol can easily provide preempty priority service through level assignment. The new protocol converges to fair distribution of the channel in the time required for only one or two round-trips. This is very fast compared with the DQDB/BB protocol.