Book review: Multiple Access Protocols: Performance and Analysis by Raphael Rom and Moshe Sidi (Springer Verlag, 1990)

Multiple Access Protocols, the focus of this book, are the rules and procedures which dictate the behavior of switches and channels in computer networks, they are the channel allocation schemes that can be found in the medium Access Control layer in the OSI reference model. Most of us have heard of FDMA, TDMA, CDMA, ethernet, CSMA, CSMA/CD, Aloha, token passing, packet switching, or their many, many variations. According to their preface, the authors aim this book at the student and professional engineer who is (or will be) responsible for the design and/or operation for such networks. Rather than giving a vast compendium of protocols and their analysis, they hope to give an understanding of the behavior and operation of multiple access systems through their performance analysis. They try to cover all types of protocols for random access networks and most of the analytical methods used in their performance analysis with a uniform notation.