Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

The Collision Avoidance Tree is a new local area network based on a hardware device called collision avoidance switch, which arbitrates random access to a shared communications channel. Collision Avoidance Tree combines the benefits of random access (low delay when traffic is light; simple, distributed, and therefore robust, protocols) with concurrency of transmission, excellent network utilization and suitability for the domain of high-speed, optical networking.

The Collision Avoidance Tree is classified in two classes: the Collision Avoidance Single Broadcast (CASB) Tree and the Collision Avoidance Multiple Broadcast (CAMB) Tree. The CASB Tree allows only a single transmission on the network at a given time, while the CAMB Tree is more general and allows concurrent transmissions on the network.

This paper describes network architectures (e.g., station and switch protocols) and designs and implementations of the CASB and CAMB Trees. Performance results derived from analyses, simulations, measurements of experimental networks are also presented.