Dynamic time slot assignment in reservation protocols for multiaccess channels

The authors discuss the dynamic control of time slot access in reservation protocols for multiaccess channels employing frame structures similar to those investigated by L. G. Roberts (1973) and others. Fixed length frame is dynamically divided on a frame-by-frame basis into a reservation subframe with minislots for reservation requests by contention, and a data subframe with reserved time slots for packet transmissions. Formulating the model as a Markov decision process, one can derive the optimal time slot allocation strategy which makes use of complete state information of the finite user population. It is shown that the optimal policy provides substantial improvements over fixed allocation strategies. Furthermore, heuristic policies that are much easier to derive and implement while maintaining performance close to optimal are proposed