Dynamic p_i-persistent protocol with reduced station hardware

The p_i-persistent protocol has received a lot of attention from the research community and is considered to be a very suitable candidate for multiple-access communication over high-speed metropolitan area networks (MANs). The p_i-persistent is a unit-capacity and distance-insensitive protocol. Further, it is a very fair protocol. In order to make the p_i-persistent protocol adaptive to changing load conditions, the inventors of the protocol proposed a novel dynamic algorithm that continuously adjusts the stations' probabilities p_i's at their proper levels as governed by the offered traffic. While this dynamic algorithm achieves extremely good results, it requires N + 1 counters at the interface of each station to the network for an N-station network. Moreover, it requires a large processing time for updating the p_i's of all stations which can have a big effect on the behavior of the protocol. In this paper, we propose a variant of this dynamic algorithm that solves these two problems while yielding exactly the same results as the original algorithm. Our new algorithm requires only a constant of 4 counters per station no matter how many stations are attached to the network. Further, the processing time for updating the P_i's is a lot less than that of the original dynamic algorithm. Thus, with our new algorithm, the p_i-persistent protocol seems to be the ideal candidate for future generation MANs.