Ring network

The purpose of media access control is to determine which station transmits when.

As in any MAC protocol, the aims are to resolve contention and provide fairness.

There are three main classes of media access protocol for ring networks: slotted, token and register insertion.

A station that wishes to transmit waits for an empty slot and puts data in.

An advantage of source-release, if the sender is banned from immediately re-using it, is that all other stations get the chance to use it first, hence avoiding bandwidth hogging.