Abstract:
We consider a communication network with many stations sharing one channel for packet transmission by a random multiple access (RMA) algorithm. Packets may carry information about their appearance times, and this information is used in order to increase the rate of the channel. We show that if a single bit is dedicated in the packet to this information, the record rate of 0.487, previously attained only with the splitting algorithm, can be raised to 0.490 with the algorithm proposed in this paper. However, the rate remains below 0.578 for any algorithm with knowledge of the appearance times of successfully transmitted packets.