Performance of packet reservation MAC protocols for wireless networks

Wireless packet-switched communications will be one of the important technologies for future mobile data networks. This paper presents performance analysis on wireless MAC protocols in which the transmission of wireless packets is reserved through contention-based access. Compared with other pure contention-based protocols, this type of protocol is suitable for wireless networks with bursty packet arrival, e.g., wireless ATM, or wireless LAN, for the reason that the carrier-sensing function cannot be efficiently implemented and the pure random access mechanism without carrier-sensing produces a very poor performance. The proposed analysis is based on simulation and the result shows that the efficiency of the protocol varies with different network parameters. The result also gives guidelines for optimizing the network performance, e.g., the control of the number of packets reserved in each request, the adjustment of signaling time-slots to the data time-slots ratio, and the adjustment of the threshold for rejecting a packet reservation request.