The n‐ary stack algorithm for the wireless random access channel

The emergence of wireless and personal communication networks has brought random access protocols for packet radio networks back to the research forefronts. Most such protocols are based on the ever popular ALOHA protocol. Unfortunately, this protocol is inherently unstable and requires sophisticated schemes to stabilize it. Another class of random access schemes, called limited sensing or stack algorithms, has been proposed that is stable and allows for the dynamic incorporation of new stations into the network. In this paper, we will review the simple to implement n-ary stack algorithm, and we will study its performance under various system parameters in the presence of capture, and also in the presence of feedback errors. Finally, we will investigate its maximum system throughput under various traffic generation processes. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

An overview of the Bluetooth wireless technology

The Bluetooth^TM wireless technology is designed as a short-range connectivity solution for personal, portable, and handheld electronic devices. Since May 1998 the Bluetooth SIG has steered the development of the technology through the development of an open industry specification, including both protocols and application scenarios, and a qualification program designed to assure end-user value for Bluetooth products. This article highlights the Bluetooth wireless technology     

A note on the conservation law for queues with batch arrivals

The conservation law formula for work-conserving queues with batch arrivals is derived for when the arrival instants of customers are assumed to constitute an arrivals see time averages (ASTA) process. The derivation is based on the analysis of the corresponding first-in first-out (FIFO) multiclass queue and its steady state. Hence, the mean work load in the queue at an arbitrary time instant can be equated with the mean time that an arbitrary customer has to wait in the FIFO queue     

A journey through the DQDB network literature

The Distributed Queue Dual Bus (DQDB) network has been adopted as the subnetwork for the IEEE 802.6 metropolitan area network (MAN) standard. Since its original proposition a few years back, DQDB has attracted significant attention because of the simplicity of its medium access control (MAC) protocol. The intense scrutiny that DQDB has been subjected to has lead to the identification of a number of its potential problems, and a number of “add-on” strategies have been proposed to “fix” such problems. Moreover, a number of architectural variations have also been proposed to improve the network behavior. Since there has been a literature explosion on DQDB over the past few years, this article is intended to extract the significant features of various DQDB-based investigations, and to present them in an unified manner.     

Jitter calculus in ATM networks: multiple nodes

We provide simple techniques for estimating the end-to-end jitter incurred by a periodic traffic in an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. Our analysis is based on the careful examination of light and heavy traffic behavior of jitter incurred to a tagged renewal stream in a single node. Our results indicate that, in the heavy traffic as the number of nodes increases, the jitter distribution approaches to a limiting distribution which only depends on the behavior of the background traffic. We provide the functional equation satisfying this limit which bounds the moments of the jitter for arbitrary level of traffic. A simple approximation method based on the heavy and light traffic analysis of the jitter process is also provided and the results is supported by extensive simulation     

airConn: A framework for tiered services in public wireless LAN hot spots

Access to the data services via wireless LANs at private and public hot spot sites is becoming commonplace. The goal of the airConn project is to define an architecture and a prototype implementation that enable the provision of premium and non-premium service tiers for both transient and nontransient users of wireless hot spots. airConn provides for dynamic renegotiation of service tiers and facilitates various billing modes. Thus, it enables service providers to increase their revenue opportunities via multiple flexibility manageable service offerings.     

Waiting time analysis in a single buffer DQDB (802.6) network

The statistics of the request and countdown counters of a user in a network that operates with the DQDB (distributed queue dual bus) media access protocol are investigated. Assuming that a user can have at most one packet waiting for transmission, an expression is obtained for the steady-state generating function of the number of requests queued ahead of an arriving packet. Given this number, the waiting time of the packet can be easily obtained. The results provide an insight on how traffic, generated from the left and the right of a user in the network, affects the waiting time characteristics of packets generated by the user     

A priority scheme for the IEEE 802.14 MAC protocol for hybridfiber-coax networks

In order to support quality-of-service (QoS) for real-time data communications such as voice, video and interactive services, multiaccess networks must provide an effective priority mechanism. The context of this work is the IEEE 802.14 standard for hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks which has a shared upstream channel for transmissions from stations to the headend. This work presents a multilevel priority collision resolution scheme, which separates and resolves collisions between stations in a priority order, thereby, achieving the capability for preemptive priorities. We present a set of simulation scenarios which show the robustness and efficiency of the scheme, such as its ability to isolate higher priority traffic from lower priorities and to provide quick access to high-priority requests. In March 1998, a framework for handling priorities in the collision resolution process, which adopts a semantics similar to the semantics of our scheme, was included in the 802.14 standard