A SURVEY OF MAC PROTOCOLS PROPOSED FOR WIRELESS ATM

Wireless ATM (W-ATM) networks have been studied extensively in recent years. Extension of ATM network services to the wireless environment f aces many interesting problems. The original ATM network was designed For high-speed, noiseless, reliable channels. None of these characteri stics are applicable to the wireless channel. One of the most critical aspects of a W-ATM network is the medium access control (MAC) protoco l used by mobile terminals (MTs) to request service from the base stat ion (BS), which has to consider the quality of service (QoS) of the sp ecific application. In this article the authors analyze some recently proposed MAC protocols, particularly those for TDMA systems, and discu ss their advantages and disadvantages.