Performance analysis of reservation and contention-based hybrid MAC for wireless networks

Hybrid media access control (MAC) protocols use reservation and contention-based approaches simultaneously, so they can provide satisfactory quality-of-service to multimedia applications by resource reservation, and achieve high resource utilization with multiplexing gain during the contention periods. However, reservation can significantly affect the behavior of the contention-based access. How to split channel time between reservation periods and contention periods and how to adjust the contention scheme for hybrid MAC are important, open issues. In this paper, an analytical model for the hybrid MAC with saturated traffic is first proposed and then extended to the unsaturated traffic case. Based on the mean value analysis, the proposed models give the average frame service time and throughput for the contention-based MAC with the presence of reserved channel periods. They are also applicable to online admission control due to their low computational complexity.