On the Performance of Distributed Polling Service-based Medium Access Control

It has been shown in the literature that many MAC protocols for wireless networks have a considerable control overhead, which limits their achievable throughput and delay performance. In this paper, we study the problem of improving the efficiency of MAC protocols. We first analyze the popular p- Persistent CSMA scheme and show that it does not achieve 100% throughput.Motivated by insights from polling system theory, we then present three polling service-based MAC schemes, termed PSMACs, for improved performance. The main idea is to serve multiple data frames after a successful contention resolution, thus amortizing the high control overhead and making the protocols more efficient. We present analysis and simulation studies of the proposed schemes. Our results show that PSMAC can effectively improve the throughput and delay performance of p-Persistent CSMA, as well as providing energy savings. We also observe that PSMAC is more efficient for handling the more general and challenging bursty traffic and outperforms p-Persistent CSMA with respect to fairness.