Dynamic prioritized conflict resolution on multiple access broadcast networks

In a multiple access broadcast network, all network nodes share a single shared communication channel, and there is the possibility of a collision when two or more nodes transmit at overlapping times. We propose a dynamic prioritized conflict resolution algorithm in which, when a collision occurs, all colliding messages are retransmitted according to their priority. When a new message arrives, it is allowed to participate in the algorithm as soon as it finds its priority is higher than that of some broadcast message. Using a time-slotted model, for any arrival pattern and priority distribution, we show that our algorithm runs in expected linear time, i.e., O(r), where r is the total number of message transmitted. We also show that the expected waiting time for any message x is O(rank(x)+log s), where rank(x) is the expected number of messages with higher priority which transmit while x is waiting, and s is the minimum of the total number of messages participating in the algorithm and the total number of nodes in the network. The analysis presented in this work also includes an improved analysis of our original (static) prioritized conflict resolution algorithm. This work is applicable to multimedia communications where different priority values could be assigned to different kinds of traffic, and our algorithm ensures that the high-priority real-time traffic has the minimum delay