A Methodology for Optimal MAC Protocol Generation: Case Study of a Synchronous MAC Channel

The authors describe a methodology that incorporates the impact of control information transfer into MAC protocol optimization. They apply this methodology to the problem of a synchronous broadcast MAC channel, to generate the optimal protocol when the objective function is the average network throughput per slot. They describe a recursive procedure for the symbolic generation of the optimization program for any choice of the objective function. They demonstrate that this methodology produces the Random Access Channel and protocols with control information as special cases in the regimes where they are optimal. They examine the scaling of optimal throughput and of computational complexity as a function of the number of nodes and the control lifetime.