SND-MAC: an efficient media access control method for integrated services in high speed wireless networks

With the development of wireless communication technology a wide range of services such as voice, video, and data communication should be provided to users. To support integrated services, efficient medium access control (MAC) methods should be developed. In this paper a new MAC, reservation-scheme and contention-scheme combined, termed the Sequence Number based Dynamic MAC (SND-MAC), is proposed to efficiently realize the integrated service in wireless communication networks. The SND-MAC can fit the integrated service overload in the network adaptively to keep the performance good. The reservation scheme used in the Heavy Overload Mode (HOM) of the SND-MAC is different from traditional ones in the sense that wireless terminals need not send reserve requests which will cause collisions to the control center. The method can greatly improve the channel utility under the HOM of the SND-MAC, there are no collisions during the communication. No slots will be wasted and the frame can be fully utilized. Moreover no hidden terminal problems will happen. The SND-MAC will improve the system performance significantly especially in the case where the integrated communication overload in the wireless network is heavy. It allows the voice, video and data terminals to share the wireless channel efficiently and makes it possible to realize integrated services based on wireless networks efficiently. The SND-MAC can also be applied to wired networks with the control center; such as HFC (Hybrid of Fiber and Cable) networks.