A programmable MAC

Multimedia service integration over wireless networks poses a number of significant challenges to the medium access control (MAC) level. Future MAC schemes need to coordinate the access to the media for heterogeneous services requiring a wide variety of quality of service (QoS). These include new adaptive multimedia services capable of gracefully responding to the reduction in the available bandwidth caused by congestion and/or channel impairments. A number of new wireless MAC protocols have been proposed in the literature for the support of integrated services. These proposal, however, are limited in that they support a selected set of service classes that are "hard wired" into the medium access control protocol. In this paper we take an alternative approach: rather than supporting a specified set of services, we describe a programmable middleware platform that allows services to be dynamically created and installed on the fly, controlled and managed.