A preemptive polling protocol for applications in wireless LANs

This paper deals with a radio‐based communication network with a single radio channel shared by several data terminals for transmissions to a single hub station. In particular, the communication system considered is a potential provider of wireless LAN‐like services. The focus is on the capacity of combining a preemptive polling‐based multiple access scheme with a Selective Repeat ARQ technique to counteract the effect of the nonstationary transmission channel. The nonstationary transmission channel has been modeled as a two‐state Markov chain with parameters related to actual propagation conditions. Typical outdoor/indoor environments have been considered. The main idea is that of making the service interruption of the preemptive polling scheme dependent on the propagation conditions of the transmission channel by monitoring the outcome of the data packet transmission attempts. A performance comparison clearly reveals the superiority of this preemptive polling scheme with respect to the classical cyclic polling scheme. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.