Single-hop and dual-hop routing strategies for polling WLAN systems

By introducing a hybrid access scheme for a star network that merges centralized and distributed features, a new approach for polling WLANs is presented. The main idea is the use of a double path where the delivery is first attempted through a direct link with a single-hop, typical of distributed LANs. When this procedure fails, the delivery is completed by means of the more reliable star hub, building a dual-hop strategy. The hub manages the token passing and allows packet delivery to other LANs. A traffic model, to characterize the intraLAN and interLAN packet flow, and an ARQ strategy, to assure the correct information delivery and to detect the unavailability of the direct path, through a given retries threshold, are introduced. The performance of the proposed system is analytically evaluated to obtain fast optimization tools and verified by means of simulations