AbstractThis paper proposes and describes R‐net, a network with a new reservation access protocol that is very suitable for implementation with optical fibre in high speed local area networks. In the operation of R‐net, a framing structure with variable length is superimposed on the network bus to bound the network medium access delay which is a highly desirable feature for real time applications. As long as the frame length constraint is not violated, the performance of R‐net network is not limited by operating data rate, and the utilization can be set to unity by choosing the appropriate network parameters. The proposed network has the advantage of efficient throughput approaching unity for most practical configurations, bounded delay, and at normal load, the network protocol has fair access for all nodes and allows dynamic bandwidth allocation between the nodes connected to the network bus. A performance (delay and utilization) comparison between R‐net and Expressnet is also pr