Replacing Aloha with a Near Perfect Universal MAC

Hi Michael and thank you for asking for clarification. When I say "replacing Aloha", we're talking about substituting a transmission scheme which operates as any other random access protocol and can dynamically shift to a reservation protocol at higher loads. It will still be a contentious network, however, collisions can only occur in the control minislots which are then resolved in a secondary queue, as opposed to the primary global transmission queue. The result is an actual performance curve that closely follows theoretical perfection, without the typical degradation that comes with more nodes and more traffic.

A network interface card could be an exemplary implementation. However, in addition to running Ethernet, the FPGA needs to be designed with a "dual MAC" for interleaving legacy and novel flows. This coexistence scheme then presents the ability to have a migration path to high performance networks which do not have Ethernet's fundamental flaw (that it does not work well without middle hardware). Perhaps we should call it "Elegant Ethernet", but the engineers who invented it at Illinois Institute of Technology for cable TV video networks named it Distributed Queuing.

As you can see from the links I've posted, all of the more recent work has been in wireless. However, the lower layer 2 MAC specification that we are proposing should also be considered for terrestrial applications served by new type of NIC. If a pure DQ switch, we would expect packet efficiency to get the same type of improvement realized in the Zigbee and LoRa radio demos -- packet efficiency went from 50% to 98%.

In the CSMA/DQ coexistence model, efficiency would be slightly lower since time would need to be devoted to legacy devices that have no knowledge of DQ switching. However, this is a small price to pay for a migration path to future networks which do not have in Ethernet's well known performance and security constraints.

Thanks very much,

Jonathan