A Medium Access Control Protocol for rt- VBR Traffic in Wireless ATM Networks

This paper proposes a MAC protocol for real-time VBR (rt-VBR) services in wireless ATM networks. The proposed protocol is characterized by a contention-based mechanism of the reservation request, a contention-free polling scheme for transferring the dynamic parameters, and a priority scheme of the slot allocation. The design objective of the proposed protocol is to guarantee the real-time constraint of rt-VBR traffic. The scheduling algorithm uses a priority scheme based on the maximum cell transfer delay parameter. The wireless terminal establishes an rt-VBR connection to the base station with a contention-based scheme. The base station scheduler allocates a dynamic parameter minislot to the wireless terminal for transferring the residual lifetime and the number of requesting slots as the dynamic parameters. Based on the received dynamic parameters, the scheduler allocates the uplink slots to the wireless terminal with the most stringent delay requirement. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can guarantee the delay constraint of rt-VBR services along with its cell loss rate significantly reduced.