Medium Access Control
General setting -- need to control access to a shared broadcast medium
Where is the control exercised?
- Centralized scheme:
- coordination is direct,
- control is optimized,
- simple tributary station logic
- Distributed control:
- high fault tolerance,
- greater efficiency and scalability
How is the control exercised? Addressing trade-offs between cost, performance and complexity
- Round robin
- “fair” scheduling oblivious to comm-n needs
- efficient for many stations w/ frequent msgs
- Reservation
- stream-oriented traffic
- deterministic worst case requirements
- Contention
- light to medium loads,
- “erratic” communication patterns