Performance evaluation of polling systems for wireless local communication networks

This paper evaluates the performance of different polling systems used in wireless local networks where the transmission channel exhibits a nonstationary behavior. Many spatially dispersed data user terminals have been assumed to share a common short-range radio uplink channel to access a hub station. We have specifically considered cyclic polling systems with M queues (terminals), having the same general packet arrival process and general switchover period. The gated and exhaustive disciplines have been considered in ordering the transmission of the packets buffered at each terminal. By appropriately modeling the uplink channel, we propose analytical approaches to derive the average packet waiting time and the average cycle length for gated polling systems, combined with stop-and-wait (SW) and go-back-N (GBN) automatic repeat request (ARQ) techniques to control errors. A gated cyclic polling scheme combined with the selective-repeated (SR) stutter ARQ technique as well as an exhaustive cyclic polling scheme combined with SW, GBN, or SR stutter ARQ techniques, respectively, have also been considered In order to give an in-depth knowledge of the behavior of suitable polling alternatives for applications in wireless local communication networks.