Performance of energy-conserving access protocols under self-similar traffic

Since widespread commercial use of wireless technology is still many years off, there is very little data to determine what constitutes an accurate model for wireless traffic. Many recent studies have shown that landline network traffic does not follow a traditional Poisson model but instead exhibits self-similar behavior. Previous papers have introduced and analyzed the performance of fundamental classes of energy conserving protocols under traditional Poisson models. In order to evaluate these protocols under a distribution which might more accurately depict future wireless network traffic, we use simulation and proven models to consider the trade-off between energy and delay under a self-similar arrival distribution.