| In most communication systems, requests for data transmission arrive at random time instants at each node of the network, with the communication generated being either of the unicast (one-to-one), the multicast (one-to-some), or of the broadcast (one-to-all) type. In such dynamic environments, the objective is to design a set of communication rules, or protocols, to perform the communication tasks as efficiently as possible. In this dissertation, we focus on three problems of this type. We first consider the dynamic broadcasting problem, where broadcast requests are generated at random times at each node of a data network. We propose two algorithms to execute them, evaluate their performance on networks of arbitrary topology, and compare the performance obtained with corresponding universal bounds. We then propose a new communication protocol for unicast communication in multiprocessor systems, and evaluate its performance on the hypercube multicomputer. The protocol is a reservation-based scheme, that uses resources in a demand basis. We last consider unicast communication in non-cellular wireless networks that use quasi-synchronous code division multiple access at the media-access layer. We propose a new connection-establishment and media-access protocol, and evaluate its performance. |
