Physical topology is ring or star, this is not specified in the standard. If an actual physical ring is used, and one of the nodes goes down the whole ring goes down. Therefore, a physical star is more commonly used. In this set up, each node connects to a ring with a bypass relay, when the node comes into the ring, the relay opens, making the link to the node part of the ring. When the node goes out of the ring, the relay closes, making the ring bypass the node.
Logical topology is a ring, the token circulates around the ring.
If a node has nothing to transmit, it passes the token on. Manchester encoding is used to synchronize the clocks. Provide clocking for the network. If a senders clock is not synchronized, the monitor has enough buffer capacity to hold up a transmission until the transmission is in synch. Drain the network of orphan frames.