THE THEORY OF PACKET BROADCASTING by

Packet broadcasting is a form of data conamications architecture which can cmbine the features of packet switching with those of broadcast channels for data communication networks. Much of the basic theory of packet broadcasting has been presented as a byproduct in a sequence of papers with a distinctly practical emphasis. In this paper we provide a unified presentation of packet 1 broadcasting theory. " In Section 2 we introduce the theory of packet broadcasting data networks. In Section 3 we provide some theoretical results dealing with the performance of a packet broadcasting network when the users of the network have a variety of data rates. In Section 4 we deal with packet broadcasting networks distributed in space and in Section 5 we derive some properties of power limited packet broadcasting channels, showing that the thruput of such channels can approach that of equivalent point-to-point channels. PTTS WA&X tDTIC TPU-aummourzced Q Justification BDistribution/ DI OTI Availability Codes copy iAvail and/or IFNSP-E ' Dist I Special This report was supported by THE ALOHA SYSTEM, a research project at the University of Hawaii, which is supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and monitored by NASA Ames Research Center under Contract No. NAS2-8590. Version: January 1976 B76 -1