The authors survey the performance degradation of LANs with respect to the normalized medium propagation delay. They discuss various schemes under the broad categories of the bus, ring, star, tree, and multichannel topology LANs. For each LAN scheme, the authors discuss its maximum achievable channel utilization and address the advantages and disadvantages of employing it.

This paper is different from other related papers on LAN performance in that it concentrates on recently proposed LAN schemes that are designed to operate at high data rates. It may be accepted by the networking community as an updated version of these LAN performance papers. The authors give the final mathematical equations for the maximum achievable channel utilization result of the various protocols and spare the reader their derivations.