On the use of control variates in the simulation of medium access control protocols

Simulation is an essential tool for performance evaluation of communication networks. We are interested in the waiting time W of packets. The control variates method profits from the knowledge of another stochastic process strongly correlated with W to reduce the uncertainty in the estimation of its mean. We analyze the usefulness of the cycle time as a control stochastic process for medium access control (MAC) protocols with polling service discipline, showing its potential and drawbacks. We propose a control variate that overcomes the disadvantages of cycle time and show its behavior in a case study. This new control variate will also be useful in the case of other MAC protocols.