Platon: a university local area network

Platon is a local area network set up in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Ottawa, operating at 1 Mbit/s and interconnecting departmental computers, terminals, peripherals, various instruments and the university mainframe. The primary objective of Platon is to facilitate network evolution and provide resource sharing by supporting various application protocols such as database access and file transfer. In addition, Platon is intended to serve as a research vehicle for distributed systems studies. To this end, a packet-voice system and a packet-radio gateway are concurrently being developed. Platon has adopted the bus architecture, using a coaxial cable with CSMA/CD as its access protocol. Retransmissions of collided packets are scheduled using a linear incremental backoff (LIB) algorithm.