Delivery and Discrimination: The Seine Protocol

We present two protocols for information exchange between multiple identical senders and a single receiver. At each instant, every sender sends one bit, and the sent bits are or-ed together into one bit before being received by the receiver. If a sender has a data massage to send, it sends the message bits one by one; otherwise it sends zero bits. Clearly, if the sending of two messages by two senders overlap, then the resulting "collision" yields a corrupted message, i.e. one that was not sent by either sender. The function of the protocol is to deliver those and only those messages that are not corrupted by collision. (In other words, the receiver acts as a discriminating seine that only catches and delivers uncorrupted messages; hence the title). These two protocols are solutions for Manchester code and general balanced codes, respectively. This protocol can be used for the design of a fiber-optic network called the D-Network.