A MAC protocol for asymmetric multimedia traffic with prioritized services in local wireless ATM networks

This paper presents and evaluates the performance of a MAC protocol for wireless ATM networks which is capable of delivering wireless ATM cells of asymmetric multimedia traffic with different service priorities on both channels. This type of traffic includes voice, data, MPEG-2 video and traffic generated by World Wide Web browsers. Due to highly unbalanced traffic between uplink and downlink channels, a time division duplex system with dynamic contention period and moveable boundaries between sub-intervals inside a fixed frame length is the technology proposed for a high speed wireless ATM (WATM) accessing system. The performance of this system is investigated with different combinations of traffic types and traffic intensities on both uplink and downlink channels. The performance results show that our proposed system provides great flexibility to accommodate unbalanced multimedia traffic with different service priorities for the users of wireless ATM terminals at an acceptable quality-of-service (QoS).