Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Packet collisions and their resolution create a performance bottleneck in random-access LANs. A hardware solution to this problem is to use collision avoidance switches. These switches allow the implementation of random access protocols without the penalty of collisions among packets. An architecture based on collision avoidance is the CAMB (Collision Avoidance Multiple Broadcast) tree network, where concurrent broadcasts are possible.

This paper is a companion to an earlier report. "TTL Implementations of a CAMB Tree Switch," where a tree network architecture was described for two different implementations of a CAMB tree switch. In the pages that follow, a hardware implementation of the interface between the network stations and the packet switches is proposed. This implementation is based on the first switch design in the companion paper.