Performance Evaluation of Back-Pressure Fairness in RPR

IEEE is currently conducting an effort to standardize a full duplex, spatial reuse, ring network architecture, called the Resilient Packet Ring (IEEE P802.17). We discuss use of backpressure flow-control for congested stations to communicate their congestion state to their upstream stations and the use of fairness algorithms to ensure fair allocation of network resources between stations on such a ring. We have developed a discrete event simulator in the programming language Java and use this simulator to evaluate the performance of the discussed back-pressure algorithms using different traffic scenarios.