The Throughput of Packet Broadcasting Channels

Packet broadcasting is a form of data communications architecture which can combine the features of packet switching with those of broadcast channels for data communication networks. Much of the basic theory of packet broadcasting has been presented as a byproduct in a sequence of papers with a distinctly practical emphasis. In this paper we provide a unified presentation of packet broadcasting theory. In Section I1 we introduce the theory of packet broadcasting data networks. In Section I11 we provide some theoretical results dealing with the performance of a packet broadcasting network when the users of the network have a variety of data rates. In Section IV we deal with packet broadcasting networks distributed in space, and in Section V we derive some properties of power-limited packet broadcasting channels,showing that the throughput of such channels can approach that of equivalent point-to-point channels.