The design of the medium-access control (MAC) protocol is the most crucial aspect for high-speed and high-performance local and metropolitan area networks, since the decisions made at this level determine the major functional characteristics of these networks. Most of the MAC protocols proposed in the literature are not suitable for multimedia applications, since they have been designed with one generic traffic type in mind. As a result, they perform quite well for the traffic types they have been designed for, but poorly for other traffic streams with different characteristics. In this paper, we propose an integrated MAC protocol called the Multimedia-MAC (M-MAC), which integrates different MAC protocols into a hybrid protocol in a shared-medium network to efficiently accommodate various types of multimedia traffic streams with different characteristics and quality-of-service demands, namely, a constant-bit-rate traffic, bursty traffic (say, variable-bit-rate traffic), and emergency messages (say, control messages). We have developed a mathematical framework for the analysis and performance evaluation of our M-MAC protocol, which involves a queueing system with vacation. We have applied our M-MAC design approach to a wavelength-division multiplexing network, and evaluated its performance under various traffic conditions.

We address the problem of the performance analysis of the stochastic fair sharing (SFS) algorithm for fair link sharing. The SFS scheme has been proposed to carry out a fair link sharing and fair sharing among virtual private networks. Depending upon the current utilization and provisioned capacities of the classes, the SFS admission control algorithm decides which sessions to accept and which to reject. In this letter, we undertake the performance evaluation of the SFS scheme analytically. We explore the tradeoff between fairness and the blocking probability by varying the trunk reservation parameter. The results show that the analytical performance measure agrees well with the simulation results.

We address the problem of the performance analysis of the stochastic fair sharing (SFS) algorithm for fair link sharing. The SFS scheme has been proposed (see Garg, R. and Saran, H., Infocom, 2000) to carry out a fair link sharing and fair sharing among virtual private networks (VPNs). Depending on the current utilization and provisioned capacities of the classes, the SFS admission control algorithm decides which sessions to accept and which to reject. We undertake the performance evaluation of the SFS scheme analytically. The main performance measure in our analysis is the session blocking probability. In particular, we obtain the Roberts-Kaufman like recursion (see Kaufman, J.S., IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.COM-29, no.19, p.1474-81, 1981) for the SFS scheme to compute the blocking probability. We then use linear programming techniques to compute the blocking probability from the above recursion.

Conventional medium access control (MAC) protocols perform quite well for the traffic types they have been designed for, but poorly for other traffic streams with different characteristics. But, the emerging multimedia applications require that the MAC protocol should perform equally well for all types of traffic characteristics. We propose an integrated MAC protocol (termed the multimedia medium access control protocol (multimedia-MAC)) which integrates different MAC protocols into a hybrid protocol to efficiently accommodate various types of multimedia traffic streams with different characteristics and QoS demands. We have applied our multimedia-MAC design approach to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) based optical network. We have developed a mathematical framework for the analysis and performance evaluation of our multimedia-MAC protocol which involves a queueing model with vacation.