ADAPTIVE PACKET LENGTH TRAFFIC CONTROL IN A LOCAL AREA NETWORK

A distributed control apparatus and method is disclosed to maintain the network stability in a packet switching local area network under changing traffic load conditions, by controlling the size of the packets transmitted by each node. The invention monitors the present information flow rate in the network and computes an average packet length which it then uses to adjust the size of the variable length data field in each message frame. In this manner, network flow control can be achieved without forcing data terminals connected to the nodes of the network to adjust their speed. The invention is applicable to a wide variety of local area network protocols for both ring and bus architectures.