Analysis of multimedia access protocols for shared medium networks

This paper proposes a methodology and framework for integrating different MAC protocols into a single shared medium network to efficiently accommodate various types of multimedia traffic streams with different characteristics and QoS demands. In particular, we propose an integrated MAC protocol which is termed multimedia medium access control (multimedia-MAC) protocol that can efficiently and simultaneously serve three types of multimedia traffic streams: a constant-bit-rate (CBR) traffic and two classes of variable-bit-rate (VBR) traffic. We have developed a queuing system with a vacation model and a multiple priority queuing system to establish a mathematical framework for the analysis and performance evaluation of our multimedia-MAC protocol besides using extensive computer simulations. The main purpose of our performance analysis and evaluation is to assess our multimedia-MAC protocol in its provision of QoS guarantees under a variety of realistic traffic and networking parameters. More importantly, our theoretical analysis results in an efficient approach to estimate the QoS of a shared medium network for given deadline missing rate (DMR) vs. network traffic load, that leads to more accurate admission control and higher network utilization in multimedia communication. The simulation results show that our approach can have an accurate estimation in a wide range of traffic load and deadline requirement.