A MAC protocol with quality of service guarantee for wireless ATM networks

In this paper we propose a new media access control (MAC) protocol that can support various ATM traffic efficiently in a wireless ATM network environment. Since the wireless channel is error-prone and has scarce bandwidth, an important issue is to devise an appropriate MAC protocol to allocate the limiting resources to each user efficiently as well as to meet the desired QoS of each connection. In the proposed MAC protocol, we design an efficient scheduling algorithm that can support the variable characteristics of VBR traffic well and allocate data slots fairly. The leaky bucket functionality in the base station (BS) is used to improve the performance and reduce the complexity of the scheduling algorithm. Consequently, the proposed MAC protocol can reduce and bound the delay time of real time traffic while meeting the QoS requirements of other traffic. The simulation results also show that our protocol outperforms other schemes no matter whether the system load is low or high.