Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

In order to overcome the performance bottleneck due to collisions and their resolution in random access LANs, a new network architecture called a broadcast star network with collision avoidance has been proposed and studied by many researchers [2 - 15]. The performance of a broadcast star network is also studied in a companion paper [11], assuming an infinite station population and synchronous operation of the network.

In this paper, we analyze the performance of a broadcast star network assuming a finite number of stations, and we obtain the throughput and the distribution of transmission delays. An exact analysis is presented first. However, this analysis is computationally practical for networks with a small number of stations only. Therefore, an approximate analysis is also presented for a network having a large number of stations. The accuracy of our approximation is examined through simulations.