Token Ring: Principles, Perspective and Strategies

Token Ring is one of the dominant LAN systems today. The installation of Token Ring networks involve important strategic and technical considerations. This book provides network technicians and engineers with an in-depth, practical discussion of the technical and strategic issues involved in implementing Token Ring.

With the aid of international standardization and open interfaces, Token Ring networks, once a relatively IBM-specific solution, have developed into universally usable, flexible and powerful local area network (LAN) systems. Thus, Token Ring is now, together with Ethernet, the dominant LAN system.

The IEEE 802 standard and the ISO 8802 standard for LANs have led to hybrid implementations of Token Ring, Ethernet, Token Bus and FDDI LANs under a common logical link control. Thus, in principle all LAN operating systems and protocol stacks are equally usable on all systems.

The ever increasing degree of PC networking and the basic concept of work group computing within modern commercial networks provide a new qualitative and quantitative impetus to the use of Token Ring. Diskless workstations with built-in LAN connections in Practice represent the status quo of professional workstation hardware.

The use of Token Ring networks requires thorough strategic and technical consideration. This book is intended to assist those interested in networks of this type.

The collaboration of two very different authors provides for ample coverage of both the technical and the strategic aspects. One author is a Business Consultant, with many years experience, from the initial development of LANs; the other author was one of the first pilot users of Token Ring in a mainframe computer centre and is now responsible for the overall data processing within a major authority.

We could have written a book on Token Rings before now. It would have been easy to summarize the comprehensive IBM manuals. However, we decided to wait until major extensions of the basic IBM scheme and the participation of other firms in the Token Ring market were well established. In the book, these extensions and alternative schemes are compared with IBM products and critically analyzed and their practical importance is assessed.

A year after the publication of the first edition of the book, we may be proud of the fact that our ideas have caught on. The book has become a leading text on Token Ring in the German-speaking market, of which DATACOM Verlag has a large share. Thus, it seemed natural to prepare an international edition in English. We believe that we have found the right partner in Addison-Wesley Publishers Limited, and would like to thank them for their faithful cooperation.

Euskirchen and Troisdorf-Bergheim bei Bonn Winter 1991