A resource conflict resolution problem formulated in continuous time
Abstract
In many situations involving data transmission from diverse sources there can be conflict for a limited number of channels or other facilities. Uncoordinated attempts by several sources to use a single facility can result in collision, the destruction of all participants in the collision, meaning the loss of the transmission, and hence the need for re-transmission. An important problem concerns the development of workable procedures for alleviating the conflict and corresponding message delay problems. Often such problems are viewed as occurring in discrete time: slots of equal length occur in temporal succession, and each slot can handle just one packet of data at a time, if two or more packets try to use the same slot simultaneously, a collision occurs that somehow must be resolved. A recent paper analyzed a stack protocol for handling such a situation, but there are many other proposals. This report is concerned with some simple models for a single facility (channel), and for contention or conflict resolution. The models are formulated in a continuous-time manner: messages, or numbers of packets constituting messages, are long, meaning that they occupy many consecutive slots on the average if a single transmission is occurring.
- Publication:
-
NASA STI/Recon Technical Report N
- Pub Date:
- August 1985
- Bibcode:
- 1985STIN...8618587G
- Keywords:
-
- Channels (Data Transmission);
- Models;
- Packet Switching;
- Packet Transmission;
- Packets (Communication);
- Message Processing;
- Queueing Theory;
- Time Lag;
- Transmission Loss;
- Communications and Radar