A Local Access Network for Packetized Digital Voice Communication

A technique for local-area communication among a large number of digital speech terminals is presented. The terminals communicate over a common wide-band broadcast transmission medium using packets. Access to the medium is controlled by a carrier-sense multiple-access protocol with collision detection. Analytic results indicate that many speech terminals having different characteristics can be supported without the necessity of buffering more than one packet. Several distributed access control algorithms are described, and a technique for predicting the performance of these algorithms is presented. Computer simulations were performed to verify the feasibility of these ideas. The simulation results agree with the prediction of the analysis.