Time Slots

Time Slots
Because Ethernet networks are sensitive to the round-trip-delay constraint of CSMA/CD, time
slots are extremely important. Remember that in 10BaseT and 100BaseT, the time slots were
512-bit times. However, this is not feasible for Gigabit because the time slot would be only
20 meters in length. To make Gigabit usable on a network, the time slots were extended to
512 bytes (4096-bit times!). However, the operation of full-duplex Ethernet was not changed
at all. Table 13.2 compares the new Gigabit Ethernet technologies.