A lower bound on the time needed in the worst case to resolve conflicts deterministically in multiple access channels

  • Authors:
  • Albert G. Greenberg;Schmuel Winograd

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Bell Laboratories, Room 2Cl16, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ;IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

A problem related to the decentralized control of a multiple access channel is considered: Suppose k stations from an ensemble of n simultaneously transmit to a multiple access channel that provides the feedback 0, 1, or 2+, denoting k = 0, k = 1, or k ≥ 2, respectively. If k = 1, then the transmission succeeds. But if k ≥ 2, as a result of the conflict, none of the transmissions succeed. An algorithm to resolve a conflict determines how to schedule retransmissions so that each of the conflicting stations eventually transmits singly to the channel. In this paper, a general model of deterministic algorithms to resolve conflicts is introduced, and it is established that, for all k and n (2 ≤ k ≤ n), &OHgr;(k(log n)/(log k)) time must elapse in the worst case before all k transmissions succeed.