Performance Evaluation of Polling Protocols for Data Transmission on Wireless Communication Networks

The growing interest in mobile computing and communication devices leads to the necessity of wireless broadband network. Data transmission over such networks requires suitable error control schemes to guarantee high data reliability as well as efficient bandwidth utilization. In this paper we propose an accurate yet simple analytical approach to evaluate the performance of wireless networks using gated and exhaustive polling protocols combined with the Stop and Wait (SW) or Go Back N (GBN) ARQ schemes [Bertsekas and Gallager, 2]. Moreover, simulation results concerning the performance of polling protocols combined with the Selective Repeat (SR) ARQ scheme are also shown for comparison purposes. Protocol performance is estimated under very general assumptions, such as: AWGN or fading channels, arbitrary value of the round trip delay and arbitrary distribution of the traffic load (i.e., both symmetric or asymmetric system have been considered).