SERIAL COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS

Systems and methods are disclosed which relate to serial communication in a ring network. The method comprises receiving, at a slave device, a bit sequence from a master device on the ring network, the bit sequence being encoded using bi-frequency encoding; synchronizing an oversampling clock to a baud rate of the received bit sequence; parsing the bit sequence to determine that the bit sequence is addressed to the slave device and that the master device is requesting data back from the slave; filling in one of a plurality of placeholder bits in the bit sequence by inverting the bit sequence midway through the bit time; and forwarding the inverted bit sequence to a subsequent slave device on the ring network, wherein the start of each bit in the bit sequence is signaled by the master device inverting the bit sequence a first time to represent a 0 and a second time to represent a 1.