An efficient collision-free protocol for prioritized access-control of cable or radio channels

We describe and analyze an efficient collision-free channel-access protocol for cable or radio networks with an arbitrary spatial (one-, two- or three-dimensional) fixed node configuration.

The protocol is robust and provides distributed access-control under a myriad of possible priority disciplines, including Fixed, Fair Round-Robin and Prioritized Round-Robin disciplines. The protocol optimally employs available information on network topology, to provide performance characteristics (throughput and delay) that are at least as good as and in most cases much better than those of other published protocols that employ less information. The performance advantage is especially significant for networks with a large number of nodes.