NOAHNET, AN EXPERIMENTAL FLOOD LOCAL AREA NETWORK.

During the past ten years, considerable effort has been invested in the creation of a variety of Local Area Computer Networks (LANs). During this exploration, features such as fault tolerance, robustness and security could have affected the design of these networks but were often given less importance than what they seem to deserve. As LANs have become the center of the office and business computer environment, the importance of such features has increased. The Noahnet attempts to incorporate these features in a LAN using a switch oriented node topology, a flooding approach for fast and robust message routing and high bandwidth communication media. In Noahnet, a node will have multiple high bandwidth paths to other network nodes; therefore, even if a portion of network is down or under service, a message will be able to propagate to the desired destination. This paper proposes the flood network architecture NOAHNET and describes the internode communication protocol used.