The Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) token ring protocol supports two classes of traffic : synchronous and asynchronous. The time constraint mechanism of FDDI garantees the transmission delay of synchronous traffic. A Target Token Rotation Time (TTRT) being fixed, the FDDI protocol ensures that the token rotation time is always bounded above by twice TTRT. In this paper, we consider the stability issues of the asynchronous traffic in the FDDI protocol. We obtain sufficient and necessary stability conditions which indicates how the choice of TTRT affects the stability of the system. We suggest an improvement of the FDDI protocol for which the token rotation time is also bounded by twice TTRT. We show that the stability conditions of the new protocol are weaker (and thus it enables to transmit more asynchronous packets). This protocol is also easier to implement.
