Max. no. of stations on a LAN

You mention TDM. Is it correct that you do not do any bus arbitration as such? That each station in turn has a time slot to send data in, and if one station has nothing to send then the slot just doesn't carry any useful information during that slot? Presumably with there being either being the ability to send "nothing" during part of a slot, or else with there being some encoding or protocol signifying "this is idle data"?

Should we also assume that there is a master clock signal controlling the synchronization, and that that clock signal is carried in such a way that it does not get skewed beyond tolerance during transmission or at intermediate switches/hubs/connectors ?

And should we also assume that the stations have the slots pre-assigned, so we don't have to worry about protocols for automatically assigning slots to stations (statically or dynamically) ?

Your bus length is 1000 m / (2 x 10^8 m/s) = 5 x 10^-6 seconds long, multiply by 10 x 10^6 bit/s (10 Mbps) to get a bus latency of 50 bits. As that is less than your TDM slot, you won't be using the bus as a storage medium ;-)

So, assuming strict pre-assigned TDM, the problem simplifies quite a bit. You just need to find the maximum number of stations, N, such that N * R

Take home exam?

Thanks Walter for your help. I am actually learning on my own and came across tutorials on this subject on the web. Here is the original question:

I guess you are right, the limitation is N * R

Do I detect a homework question here?