Integrating voice with the pi-persistent protocol for unidirectional broadcast bus networks

A previously proposed protocol is extended to include voice for multiaccess communication over unidirectional broadcast bus networks. The authors use a framed approach for integrating these two traffic types where a frame, which is repeated, consists of a voice subframe followed by a data subframe. They use speech detectors for modeling speech sources in order to prevent the loss of about 60% of the bandwidth that would otherwise be required, and they use a moveable-boundary scheme in which the voice subframe size is estimated from the number of voice packets transmitted in the previous frame. The authors determine the fraction of speech loss and the fraction of wasted allocated bandwidth due to the estimator by formulating Markov chain for the number of ready voice stations at the frame boundaries. To analyze data performance, they use a nonhomogeneous Markov chain or a data station´s buffer content just before the data slots visit that station. By proper control of the estimator function, they can guarantee an upper bound on the average speech loss at any voice station, and a combined voice-data throughput close to unity is achieved. Results from the analysis and from a simulation match closely