E-DCP, an Extension of the Distributed-Control Polling MAC Protocol (DCP) for Integrated Services

Abstract This paper describes and analyzes a novel MAC protocol named E-DCP which provides additional mechanisms to the already designed DCP MAC protocol in order to support service integration. E-DCP provides two service classes: synchronous and asynchronous. For both classes, a polling algorithm is used to manage the acquisition of transmission rights (reservations). Each time a node observes the start of a new synchronous cycle, it is alloted a certain quota of slots for synchronous traffic transmission and the unused bandwidth is fairly divided among all the nodes for asynchronous traffic. The access scheme for synchronous traffic exhibits certain properties which have been exploited to define a methodology to derive bounds on the quality of service parameters relevant to real time traffic (access delay and packet loss).