A new procedure to analyze random multiaccess protocols for multimedia applications

Multimedia traffic is carried over multi-access channels using random multi-access protocols (RMAP) to access the common channel by users' equipment. The main goal of any RMAP is that the network is shared by all users in a fair way. RMAP must also be able to cope with the QoS that different multimedia traffic requires. Current protocols proposed for multimedia traffic are very sophisticated and difficult to analyze because they use distributed queues. The main goal of this paper is to present a common methodology to analyze multimedia RMAP. The results obtained by this procedure include the computation not only of the expected values but the distributions of the final interdeparture time and the departure burst size.