A survey of token passing approaches for real time communications in WTPN

The most severe challenge faced by the wireless networks in supporting real time communications is sharing of wireless channel. A Wireless Token Passing Network (WTPN) is the one that utilizes token passing approaches for sharing the wireless medium. The token passing approaches are characterised by passing the tokens in the wireless local area network and the station that holds the token gets the permission to access the wireless channel. Token passing approaches are applied for the wireless networks as they are proved to be very effective in providing access for the stations to the shared wireless channel when compared to the existing polling mechanisms and the master-slave techniques. This paper synthesizes the existing token passing approaches that support real time communications in the wireless token passing networks and highlights the comparative analysis of these token passing approaches.