A METHOD OF DETECTING A HOT CARRIER CONDITION IN A MULTIPLE ACCESS DATA COMMUNICATION NETWORK

A method for determining the location of a hot transmitter and provide an indication thereof both at the site of the fault and at neighboring stations. Stations sensing a busy condition on the common bus medium operate after a timeout interval of predetermined duration to attempt to send a test message of predetermined form while maintaining receptive linkage to the medium. If the received signal correlates with the outgoing message, the originating station infers that its transmitter is hot. A station determining that its transmitter is hot, stores a locally displayable indication of its condition and broadcasts a "hot location" message which actuates the other stations on the network to store corresponding indications. In a preferred embodiment of the invention, locally linked stations, using a CSMA/CD link access protocol, specify their own network addresses as destinations in the abovementioned test messages.