Quality-of-service oriented medium access control for wireless ATM networks

The medium access control (MAC) protocol and the underlying traffic scheduling algorithm developed within project Magic WAND (Wireless ATM Network Demonstrator) are presented. Magic WAND is investigating wireless ATM technology for customer premises networks in the framework of the Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS) program funded by the European Union. The MAC protocol, known as MASCARA, is a hub-based, adaptive TDMA scheme which combines reservation- and contention-based access methods to provide multiple access efficiency and quality-of-service guarantees to wireless ATM terminal connections sharing a common radio channel. The traffic scheduling algorithm is delay-oriented to meet the requirements of the various traffic classes defined by the ATM architecture. The results of the simulation of a number of scenarios are presented to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm.