QGMA: a new MAC protocol for supporting QoS in wireless local area networks

We propose a novel MAC protocol, called quality-of-service guarantee multiple access (QGMA), in wireless local area networks to support the quality-of-service required by embedded real-time applications and multimedia-integrated distributed control. As compared to other existing MAC protocols, QGMA achieves high system utilization, and provides a deterministic bound on the connection establishment delay and temporal QoS for real-time applications. In particular by having the base station handle resource arbitration and utilize different scheduling algorithms to arbitrate access to data slots on a wireless channel, mobile hosts (MHs) are relieved from the burden of coordinating all the ongoing activities, and moreover different levels of temporal QoS can be easily achieved.