Home Network Basis: Transmission Environments and Wired/Wireless Protocols

8.1. Arbitration Protocol

The structure of a 1394 serial bus is unique in that the transmission media, consisting of many point-to-point connections between pairs of individual ports, are shared through the repetition of packets received on one port to other active ports by each node. The topology of a 1394 serial bus resembles a tree with many intermediate nodes located at branching joints and a single node at the root. All requests for transmission are either filtered out by intermediate nodes or propagated to the root node for an arbitration decision. A permission to transmit is granted by the root node and delivered through intermediate nodes. The configuration of the tree structure and the election of a root node are automatically carried ...