Recently we have developed a class of media access control algorithms for different types of Local Area Networks. A common feature of these LAN algorithms is that they represent various strategies by which the processors in the LAN can simulate the availability of a centralized packet transport facility, but whose service incorporates a particular type of change over time known as 'moving sever' overhead. First we describe the operation of moving server systems in general, for both First-Come - First-Served and Head-of-the-Line orders of service, together with an approach for their delay analysis in which we transform the moving server queueing system into a conventional queueing system having proportional waiting times. Then we describe how the various LAN algorithms may be obtained from the ideal moving server system, and how a significant component of their performance characteristics is determined by the performance characteristics of that ideal system. Finally, we evaluate the compatibility of such LAN algorithms with separable queueing network models of distributed systems by computing the interdeparture time distribution for M/M/1 in the presence of moving server overhead. Although it is not exponential, except in the limits of low server utilization or low overhead, the interdeparture time distribution is a weighted sum of exponential terms with a coefficient of variation not much smaller than unity. Thus, we conjecture that a service centre with moving server overhead could be used to represent one of these LAN algorithms in a product form queueing network model of a distributed system without introducing significant approximation errors
