Ring Networks

Metropolitan are networks (MANs) are located between access and backbone networks, as depicted in Fig. 0.3. MANs have a number of distinctive properties which have to be taken into account in the design of metro network architectures and access protocols: The geographical coverage of MANs is limited. Typically, MANs have a diameter of 50 to 200 km.The number of nodes in a MAN is rather modest in the approximate range from 10 to 250 nodes.Compared to backbone networks, MANs have to be more cost-effective due to the smaller number of subscribers and the traffic in MANs is more bursty.While the nature of data traffic in LANs [LTWW94] and WANs [PF95] have been investigated, defining traffic models for MANs is an open question at the time of writing.While mesh networks are quite common in the backbone, metro networks typically have a ring, bus, or star topology.