Access protocol for broadband multimedia centralized wireless local area networks

The development of wireless local area networks (WLANs) has become a major goal in the field of computer and wireless communications. The Network Technologies Research group at the Communications Research Center in Canada has been working in a project to develop a high speed multimedia outdoor WLAN. In contrast to many existing WLANs, the new WLAN supports multimedia traffic and is intended to be mainly used in an outdoor environment with a coverage range of 20 to 30 km. One of the challenges of this project is the development of a medium access control (MAC) protocol that will enable the voice, video and data terminals to efficiently share the wireless channel. The MAC protocol adopted for this WLAN with a speed of 10 to 20 Mbps is presented.