Performance consideration for packet reservation multiple access protocols over wireless networks

This paper presents a performance analysis of wireless MAC protocols in which the transmission of wireless packets is reserved through contention-based access. Compared with other pure random access protocols, this type of protocol is suitable for wireless networks with bursty packet arrivals, e.g., wireless ATM, or wireless LAN, for the reason that the carrier-sensing function cannot be efficiently implemented, thereby resulting in a very poor performance on the pure random access mechanism. The proposed analysis is based on simulation and the result shows that the efficiency of the protocol varies with different network parameters. The result also gives guidelines for optimizing the network performance, e.g., the control of the number of packets reserved in each request, the adjustment of signaling time-slots to the data time-slots ratio, and the adjustment of the threshold for rejecting a packet reservation request