IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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An adaptive medium access control protocol for local area networks is presented, which is based on the separation of the network stations into groups. All the groups are granted permission to transmit in a round-robin fashion. The main objective of the grouping algorithm is to have exactly one ready station in each group. In this way, idle slots and collisions are minimized and a nearly optimal throughput-delay performance is achieved. The grouping of stations is dynamically modified at each time slot according to the network feedback information. In this way, the protocol is capable of being adapted to the sharp changes of the stations' traffic. The performance of the presented Adaptive Grouping Protocol when operating under asymmetric bursty traffic is studied via extensive simulation results. It is compared to other well-known medium access control protocols and it is found that it outperforms them.