I’ve been delving into the world of networking and have read about “deterministic data communications”. I Googled the word “deterministic” and it says “relating to the philosophical doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the will.”
Can someone how that relates to data communications?
Thanks 🙂
In: 7
As an example of network that is not deterministic is Ethernet. On a standard ethernet network, if two computers try and transmit at the same time, there is a collision, and the transmit fails. Then both computers stop, wait a random amount of time, and try again. On a network with a lot of computers, it is possible nobody would ever get to transmit, because after the random timeout, there could be a collision with another computer that is trying to transmit. In practice however, it usually works pretty well.
However there are other protocols like token ring, where a token is passed around the network and whoever has the token is the only one who can transmit. These are more deterministic since you know how often you’ll get the token, so there is a guarantee on how often you will be able to transit.
Something like USB, bandwidth can be reserved. Your USB audio interface can say I need a block of data every X milliseconds. Then nobody else can use that time slot, so if you are writing to your hard drive it will periodically need to wait. This makes sure your sound never glitches.
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