Markov analysis of multichannel star-connected network with channel sensing and collision detection

When many stations need to communicate with a central server, the simplest way to allow them to transmit messages to the server is to use a non-centralised contention access protocol. One of the most efficient of these protocols is channel sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD). Exact analyses of single-channel CSMA/CD networks have been done, but, so far, all the analyses of multichannel CSMA/CD networks in the literature have used approximations to simplify the process of finding the transition matrix. The paper presents an exact Markov analysis of a multichannel CSMA/CD network. It is shown that such a multichannel system performs better than an equivalent network having just one channel