Tandem Packet-Radio Queueing Networks

Most research in the area of packet-radio networks has been confined to one-hop hearing topologies. This paper investigates tandem networks which are multihop networks. We assume that the nodes of the tandem have infinite buffers and they share a common radio channel for transmission of data packets. We also assume that each node transmits whenever it has a packet ready for transmission. We treat two tandem networks here. The first is a tandem having arbitrary number of nodes and packets arrive to the network only at the "top" node. The second is a four-node tandem network where packets arrive to all the nodes. The arrival processes to the nodes here might, in general, be dependent. For these networks we derive the joint generating functions of the contents of the queues at the nodes in steady-state. From the generating functions, any moment of the queue lengths can, in principle, be derived as well as average time delays in the network. We also give an example for independent Bernoulli arrival processes. *This research was carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Information and Decesion Systems with partial support provided by the National Science Foundation undger grant'NSF-ECS-8310698. **Moshe Sidi is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, TechnionIsrael Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. He is currently a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.