Abstract: The pi-persistent medium access protocol is an attractive solution for high-speed fiber-optic unidirectional bus networks. Sarkar and Pawlikowski (2001) investigated the delay versus throughout characteristics and fairness performance of pi -persistent protocol, including the 1-persistent protocol. The main advantage of 1-persistent protocol over the pi-persistent protocol is the reduced mean packet delay (network-wide and also for individual stations), but the potential drawback of this protocol is the lack of fairness. In contrast. The pi-persistent protocol can provide good fairness in the sense that mean delays become almost station position independent, but the main drawback of this protocol is the inevitable increase in packet delay. In this paper we propose a new scheme, called pi-persistent/HH (pi-persistent protocol with hitch-hiking mechanism for slot pre-use) that can offer the combining advantages of 1-persistent and piprotocols (i.e. Low mean delay and fairness). The low mean delay as well as fairness is achieved by introducing a special mechanism of slot pre-use, called hitch-hiking (HH). In this paper the pi-persistent/HH scheme is described and simulation results are presented to verify the projected performance.