Two protocols suitable for random multiple access packet broadcast in a multichannel communication system are proposed and analyzed. Broadcast channels are classified as retransmission channels devoted in collision resolution of busy stations and as contention channels for the access of free stations. The proposed protocols differ in the way that a busy station is allocated to a retransmission channel for collision resolution. Analytic Markovian models are developed so as to evaluate the system performance in terms of throughput and delay. The performance of multichannel systems is compared with the single channel system. Numerical results show performance improvement under heavy load.
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