Description and Performance Evaluation of HARAL (Hybrid Adaptive Random Access ProtocoL), an efficient Protocol for Multi-access Channels

Random Multi-access Protocols has been used as the MAC protocol over Multi-access channels. They are specially recommended when there are a large population of users with low and bursty traffic as for example it will be in HFC (Hybrid Fiber-Coax) networks with multimedia services, we should be sure that the access to the network copes with the QoS. each type of traffic requires. We will describe in this paper a new protocol named HARAL (Hybrid Adaptive Random Access ProtocoL), basically it is a collision random multi-access protocol with distributed queues. Its main features are to be robust, adaptive, simple and easy to implement, it also can be easily modified for different services, thus it can configured to be blocked/non-blocked, windowed/not-windowed, with fix or variable number of minislots, and so on. A deep analysis of its main performance parameters has been also computed. We think that HARAL suits very well to the requirements different multi-access networks demand such HFC, industrial, wireless and so on.