Analysis and performance evaluation of HYPERchannel access protocols

HYPERchannel [1,3,5,7] is a local network configuration with random access to the global transmission medium and with ‘Carrier Sense’ techniques. Conflicts are resolved by a fixed priority scheduling of retransmissions.This paper presents a performance evaluation of HYPERchannel access protocols for different types of user systems. Analytical results and asymptotic relations are obtained for the throughput of HYPERchannel under different load characteristics.The fixed priority rule for retransmissions discriminates against low priority users; a modification of the access scheme (‘Fair HYPERchannel’) is proposed which compensates for this undesirable effect. The performance of this new protocol version is also evaluated.In a final section, the access schemes of HYPERchannel are compared with similar access protocols.