METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTROLLING LATENCY AND JITTER IN A LAN USING A CSMA/CD PROTOCOL

摘要

An Ethernet network (Fig. 2) or other CSMA/CD network (Fig. 1) includes hub adaptors (A1-A4) that are modified to provide a known bounded low maximum access latency. The modified adaptors (A1-A4) maintain a state variable whose values indicate whether the last operation by an adaptor was a transmit or a receive. In the case where the last operation was a receive (S4), the adaptor transmits a packet (S6) with a minimum or zero backoff as an option with a reduced interpacket gap. In the case where the last operation was a transmit (S4), the adaptor waits before transmitting a packet (S8) a period of time that allows the other node on the channel to transmit a packet if the other node has a packet to transmit.