Altruistic Traffic Limits Computation in Wireless Broadcast Networks

The statistical behavior of wireless medium access can generally be described by a function that relates the offered traffic to the collision probability and delay. Given a maximum tolerable collision probability and/or delay (quality-of-service constraints), one can derive the maximum admissible offered traffic for a given medium access strategy. In this paper, we describe both a centralized as well as a distributed algorithm that can, for an arbitrary connectivity configuration, compute the maximum traffic that may be sourced into the network by any network node under the constraint that the maximum offered traffic condition is met at any node. We demonstrate that both algorithms achieve significant improvements for most networks compared to a static maximum traffic assignment.