A MAC protocol with priority splitting algorithm for wireless ATM networks

This paper deals proposes a medium access control (MAC) protocol for ensuring the quality of service (QoS) of integrated multimedia services on wireless links. The wireless ATM MAC protocol which incorporates dynamical polling, idle uplink (UL) data channel conversion, piggybacking and an interruptable priority splitting algorithm (named THBPSA) for resolving random access collisions is proposed and named TPICC. The effect of the priority splitting algorithm on the performance of the TPICC is simulated and compared with a counterpart of the TPICC which uses an unprioritised binary splitting algorithm (UBSA) in the RA slots. The effect of an invalid polling detecting (IPD) mechanism on the UL bandwidth efficiency is also simulated. The simulation results show that the THBPSA algorithm ensures a smaller medium access delay for realtime traffic classes than for non-realtime traffic classes. Comparing THBPSA with a priority scheduling scheme which is used in the base station (BS) and features packet time stamps, THBPSA provides realtime traffic classes with a much less UL packet delay than non-realtime traffic classes. The UL bandwidth used by the dynamic polling of realtime traffic classes is tolerable.