Z. Harpantidou et M. Paterakis, RANDOM MULTIPLE-ACCESS OF BROADCAST CHANNELS WITH PARETO DISTRIBUTED PACKET INTERARRIVAL TIMES, IEEE personal communications, 5(2), 1998, pp. 48-55
We consider the random multiple access of a slotted broadcast communic
ation channel. Packet arrivals for such channels are often modeled as
Poisson processes because the latter have attractive theoretical prope
rties and are well understood, even though a number of traffic studies
have shown that packet interarrival times are not always exponentiall
y distributed. For example, recent studies argue convincingly that tra
ffic from a variety of working packet networks (LANs, WANs, etc.) is m
uch better modeled using statistically self-similar processes to chara
cterize the packet interarrival times of the aggregate traffic, which
have much different properties than Poisson processes. Because of the
great influence multiple access algorithms (used in the channel access
subsystem) will have on the performance of third-generation digital w
ireless mobile communication systems, we study in this article the pro
blem of random multiple access under packet traffic generated by inter
active data applications (e.g., reading/composing short e-mail message
s, responding to paging type messages, transferring files between the
mobile and a fixed computer, and querying of a database). We examine a
nd demonstrate the performance robustness of the above RAAs when they
are driven by a strongly bursty packet arrival process, commonly found
in interactive data applications.