The number of packets transmitted by collision detect random access schemes (Q1093270)

An infinite number of stations share a single communication channel. Packets for transmission arrive at a station in a Poisson stream of rate \(\nu >0\) from time \(t=0\) onward and no station ever has more than one packet arrive at it. All stations are synchronized and the time axis is slotted so that one packet can be successfully transmitted in a slot \((t,t+1)\), \(t=1,2,....\) However, if two or more stations transmit in a slot, there is a collision and none of the packets involved is successfully transmitted. When a station transmits a packet, it learns at the end of the slot whether the packet has been successfully transmitted or whether a collision has occurred. Call the collection of packets that have collied and await transmission the backlog. A station with a backlogged packet waits for a random time and then retransmits the packet, repeating this procedure until the packet is successfully transmitted. In this paper the case is considered where the only information a station has concerning other stations or the use of the channel is the history of its own transmission attempts. Retransmission policies which use only this information are called collision detect (or acknowledgment based) random access schemes. For such schemes it is established that the number of packets successfully transmitted is infinite with probability 0 or 1 according as the arrival rate is greater than or less than a critical value. The simplest example of such a retransmission policy is the Aloha scheme. A more sophisticated retransmission policy is the Ethernet scheme.