A bandwidth reservation multiple access protocol for wireless ATM local networks

A bandwidth reservation multiple access scheme (BRMA) is proposed to resolve contention and assign bandwidth among multiple users trying to gain access to a common wireless channel. The protocol is best suited to support variable-bit rate (VBR) traffic. The channel capacity is modeled as a time frame with a fixed duration. Each frame starts with mini-slots, to resolve contention and reserve bandwidth, followed by data-transmission slots. Every contending user places a request for data slots in one of the mini-slots and starts transmission in the assigned data slot(s). A speech activity detector is utilized to avoid wasting bandwidth. Due to its asynchronous nature, BRMA is rather insensitive to the burstiness of traffic from each mobile station. Due to the deterministic assignment of the mini-slots, the request channels are contention-free and the data channels are collision-free. BRMA provides better performance than conventional TDMA and PRMA for the same quality of service (QoS).