A journey through the DQDB network literature

The Distributed Queue Dual Bus (DQDB) network has been adopted as the subnetwork for the IEEE 802.6 metropolitan area network (MAN) standard. Since its original proposition a few years back, DQDB has attracted significant attention because of the simplicity of its medium access control (MAC) protocol. The intense scrutiny that DQDB has been subjected to has lead to the identification of a number of its potential problems, and a number of “add-on” strategies have been proposed to “fix” such problems. Moreover, a number of architectural variations have also been proposed to improve the network behavior. Since there has been a literature explosion on DQDB over the past few years, this article is intended to extract the significant features of various DQDB-based investigations, and to present them in an unified manner.