Broad-band technology provides several advantages for personal computer local area networks (PC LAN's) including mature readily available transmission technology, large total bandwidth, support for multiple services, and cost-effective expansion from very small to very large systems. This paper presents an overview of basic broad-band technology, hardware, software, and protocols needed for PC LAN's. Gateways and network management are also considered. Recent PC LAN products are compared, with a more detailed case study of the PC LAN developed by IBM and Sytek.

The Department of Defense has embarked on a Protocol Standardization Program aimed at the development of high-level protocol standards for the DoD internetwork environment. A major piece of this standardization program involves the development of the "DoD Protocol Reference Model" [1], which will serve to describe a basic framework for future DoD protocol standardization activities.

Interconnection of multiple broadband local area networks to form an integrated packet transport system presents several challenges. To take full advantage of broadband systems, assignment of nodes to channels must be dynamic, leading to the use of a flat address space. Combined with the desire to avoid reliance on a central server or complex routing in packet forwarders, this addressing scheme leads to adoption of a controlled flooding technique to “discover” the best path to a destination node. This discovery procedure sets up a path through internetwork forwarders for use by subsequent packets to the same destination. This paper describes the design and implementation of such a technique in Sytek's LocalNet(TM) systems along with several refinements which increase performance and keep the worst case load for route discovery below a few percent of network capacity.

The protocol architecture of a broad-band local area network (LAN) must consider a realm of issues ranging from user device requirements to the characteristics of the underlying broad-band cable medium. The primary environment for which these protocols are intended consists of a collection of multichannel broad-band local networks, connected by point-to-point links. This paper describes one example of a broad-band LAN protocol architecture, LocalNet (TMSytek Inc.). Particular attention is paid to those design decisions and practical considerations which were prompted by the intended environment.