This paper focuses on access protocols for supporting real-time communications in a distributed system; specifically, we analyze the MetaRing protocol. MetaRing is a protocol, designed and prototyped to handle, in a local or metropolitan area environment, both period traffic with real-time constraints (synchronous traffic) and bursty data traffic with no delay constraints (asynchronous traffic). We show that, in the original proposal of the MetaRing protocol, the deadlines of real-time messages are not always satisfied. To solve this problem, we propose a modified version of MetaRing, named MetaRing +. Through a performance study, the properties of MetaRing + are deeply investigated. © 1996 IEEE.