A control plane for prioritized real-time communications in wireless token ring networks

Providing real-time guarantees in wireless networks is a challenging research problem. Token ring networks are more suitable for real-time communications due to the fact that the response time is highly deterministic and also the upper bound of the latency in these networks is predictable. This paper proposes a centralized control plane incorporating the timed token protocol in the MAC layer for providing hard real-time guarantees in wireless token ring networks which implements three important functions, namely the admission control procedure, the station eviction procedure and a traffic differentiation mechanism. In this approach a dynamic ring structure is built, where high priority stations have more chance of admittance and stations with low priority can be removed from the ring. Simulation results show that the proposed control plane ensures higher priority traffic more bandwidth than lower priority traffic and guarantees that deadline constraints of hard real-time traffic are satisfied.