An analysis is made of the impact of various design decisions on the error detection capability of the fiber distributed data interface (FDDI), a 100-Mb/s fiber-optic LAN stardard being developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

In particular, the frame error rate, token loss rate, and undetected error rate are quantified. Several characteristics of the 32-b frame check sequence (FCS) polynomial, which is also used in IEEE 802 LAN protocols, are discussed.

The standard uses a nonreturn to zero invert on ones (NRZI) signal encoding and a 4-bit to 5-bit (4b/5b) symbol encoding in the physical layer. Due to the combination of NRZI and 4b/5b encoding, many noise events are detected by code (or symbol) violations. A large percentage of errors are detected by FCS violations. The errors that escape these three violations remain undetected. The probability of undetected errors due to creation of false starting delimiters, false ending delimiters, or merging of two frames is analyzed.

It is shown that every noise event results in two code bit errors, which in turn may result in up to four data bit errors. The FCS can detect up to two noise events. Creation of a false starting delimiter or ending delimiter on a symbol boundary also requires two noise events. This assumes enhanced frame validity criteria. The author justifies the enhancements by quantifying their effect.

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