A Scheduling-Based Medium Access Control Protocol for Supporting Multi-class Services in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose a scheduling-based medium access control (MAC) protocol for supporting multi-class services in wireless networks. The proposed protocol is a centralized MAC protocol which applies a coordinator node (CN) to coordinate the network. Our protocol is composed of a slot-scheduling algorithm called weighted scheduling and a quality of service (QoS) enhanced admission control algorithm. The weighted scheduling algorithm is designed to efficiently utilize the network bandwidth and fairly schedule the transmission for various types of services, whereas the QoS-enhanced admission control algorithm is proposed to manage resources and guarantee the QoS requirements of services. We make mathematical analysis for the protocol parameters and compare our protocol with IEEE 802.11e EDCF and IEEE 802.11 PCF in terms of throughput and delay by conducting simulations. The experimental results show that our protocol has the best throughput and delay performance among the simulated protocols. Moreover, our protocol has much fewer collisions than IEEE 802.11e EDCF has and always keeps on excellent performance even in the high-loaded network.