A MAC protocol for wireless access to ATM networks

• Published in: Gateway to 21st Century Communications Village. VTC 1999-Fall. IEEE VTS 50th Vehicular Technology Conference (Cat. No.99CH36324) Vol. 2; pp. 1058 - 1062 vol.2
• Main Authors: Iera, A., Molinaro, A., Marano, S., Petulla, F.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 1999
• Subjects: Access protocols; Algorithm design and analysis; Bandwidth; Bit rate; Channel allocation; Delay estimation; Media Access Protocol; Quality of service; Resource management; Wireless application protocol
• ISBN: 9780780354357; 0780354354
• ISSN: 1090-3038; 2577-2465
• DOI: 10.1109/VETECF.1999.798597

This paper presents a TDMA-based MAC algorithm for wireless-ATM systems, able to deal with heterogeneous traffic. Attention focuses on a random access methodology based on reservation, and a channel handling policy exploiting dynamic resource allocation. Further features of the proposed MAC are: the use of piggyback and control mini-slots to handle rt-VBR traffic, a reservation sub-frame which dynamically changes its dimension, and, most important, a resource allocation strategy based on the value of an urgency index, which takes into account the maximum allowed delay for each type of traffic in the system. The MAC algorithm behaviour is compared with that of alternative schemes, based just on the estimation of the terminal buffer sizes. A better performance is found for different traffic load conditions.