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 [1, 2]. Collision avoidance switches allow the implementation of random access protocols without the penalty of collisions among packets.

In this paper, we describe a design and implementation of a local area network architecture based on collision avoidance, called the Collision Avoidance Multiple Broadcast (CAMB) tree network. Our implementation includes CAMB tree switches, station/network interface boards, and support of transport protocols. Our implementation of the CAMB tree network follows the protocol layering architecture of the IEEE 802 local area networks.