Adding Alien Traffic Endurance to Wireless Token-Passing Real-Time Protocols

Supporting real-time traffic in a wireless network is a challenging task due to the high probability of errors and to the interference that can be provoked by other networks in the same area. There may be situations in which alien traffic is present by default and communication systems have to deal with difficulty by adapting their characteristics to provide the highest possible level of timing guarantees and performance. In this paper we propose a technique to make real-time protocols tolerant to alien traffic and able to provide soft real-time behavior even in the presence of high traffic loads, using a variable timeout window that allows belated acknowledgments to be accepted also.