[ih] principles of the internet
Noel Chiappa
jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Thu Jun 3 10:22:59 PDT 2010
> From: John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>
> Alohanet and Ethernet make the same "effort." The difference is the
> theoretical limit of the media. Ethernet is higher because the aether
> has been replaced by coax. Not because Ethernet made more effort than
> Alohanet.
Not sure if this is what you're referring to with your reference to "aether
... replaced by coax", but... Ethernet's channel access algorithm (CSMA-CD) is
slightly different from Aloha's (which was, IIRC, CSMA). (To get the -CD to
work semi-reliably they had to limit the network's physical size, and increase
the minimum packet size, in ways that weren't feasible with the aether.) I
seem to recall that adding the -CD upped the theoretical throughput (as a
%-age of channel bit rate) considerably.
Noel
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