Local area networks

Pitro Zafiropulo is a- staff member at the IBM Research Laboratories at Zurich. He joined IBM in 1968 and has worked on protocol validation, synthesis, integrated networks, network reliability, PABX's and speech recognition. Local Area Networks are intended to provide improved communication capabilities such as high data throughput rates, low error rates and ease of connection among terminal stations and comuters. These new types of networks operate within a limited geographical range like an establishment, campus or building and are owned by a single organization. The presentation introduces these networks and the main techniques are described. It then proceeds to evaluate the main switching techniques as they apply to LAN ring and bus configurations. The preferred technique of token-ring distributed switching is identified. The contents of Mr. Zafiropoulo's talk was somewhat similar to the paper of Mr. Kummerle, which is therefore included in these Proceedings.