Design of interfaces for workstations operating in a high speed fiber optic network

Abstract

The first part of this thesis describes the design and implementation of the hardware and software for the Fiber Distributed Data Interface protocol based on a Personal Computer adapter board conforming to the Industry Standard Architecture. Emphasis is given 10 the specification and design of the system whereby object-oriented and Finite State Machine techniques were adopted. The PC adapter implements the hardware conforming to the FDDI standard for a Single Attachment Station on the IBM PC's and compatibles. The driver program operates at the data link layer and serves as a basic building block for the development and construction of higher layer communications software. It also incorporates a custom designed software kernal that performs specific scheduling functions. This enables main memory processing in the PC and building of frames for transmission and reception of frames to continue while awaiting keyboard input from higher level protocols. This implementation greatly enhances the parallelism and efficiency of the transmission and reception processes and reduces the link level processing overheads.