Performance evaluation of preemptive polling schemes and ARQ techniques for indoor wireless networks

This paper examines a radio-based indoor communication network with a single radio channel shared by several data terminals. By enabling the terminals to communicate with each other and access the resources of a wired network, the system is a potential provider of in-building LAN-like services. In this indoor fading environment, a base-station approach is assumed. In the analysis, a two-state Markov chain model is used to model the nonstationary transmission channel. Two preemptive polling multiple-access schemes combine with ARQ error-control schemes to counteract the effects of a nonstationary transmission channel. The main idea here devised is that of making the service interruption dependent on the propagation conditions of the transmission channel by monitoring the outcomes of the data packet transmission attempts. A performance comparison reveals the superiority of the preemptive polling systems with respect to a classical TDMA scheme.