Multiple access protocol for supporting multimedia services in wireless ATM networks

The future broadband wireless asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks must provide seamless extension of multimedia services from the wireline ATM networks. This requires an efficient wireless access protocol to fulfil varying quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for multimedia applications. In this paper, we propose a multiple access protocol using centralized and distributed channel access control techniques to provide QoS guarantees for multimedia services by taking advantage of the characteristics of different kinds of ATM traffic. Multimedia traffic, including constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate (VBR) and available bit rate (ABR) with different kinds of applications, such as voice, video-conferencing, MPEG video and Web-browsing, is considered to evaluate the proposed protocol. Simulation results show that the proposed multiple access protocol can support a wide range of telecommunication applications at the same time with high efficiency and guaranteed QoS.