Addressing modes and management protocols in a gigabit LAN with switching tables

The present paper suggests an hierarchical structure for the MAC layer of high-speed LANs with a ring topology. The lower part of this layer consists of high-speed dedicated hardware, called the interface, that sits on the data-path and is responsible for those operations that should be performed in the link transmission speed: getting access-control, removing frames and accepting frames. The upper part, called the MAC manager, can be an all-purpose microprocessor. It is responsible for all the other operations associated with the MAC layer. The paper shows that when short labels are used as addresses, the interface algorithm can be based on two small 'switching tables', whose contents is determined by the MAC manager.