Performance Evaluation of Polling Protocols for Data Transmission on Wireless Communication Networks

The growing interest of mobile computing and communication devices, leads to the needs of wireless broadband networks. Data transmission over such networks requires suitable error control schemes to guarantee high data reliability as well as efficient bandwidth utilization. This paper proposes an accurate but simple analytical approach to evaluate the performance of wireless networks using gated and exhaustive polling protocols combined with the Stop and Wait (SW) or Go Back N (GBN) ARQ schemes [1]. Protocol performance can be estimated under very general assumptions, most important are: AWGN or fading channels, arbitrary value of the round trip delay and arbitrary distribution of the traffic load (i.e. both symmetric or asymmetric system).