An adaptive QoS guaranteeing MAC protocol for real-time traffic in TDMA-based wireless ATM networks

This paper presents a new media access control (MAC) protocol based on forw ard error control (FEC), which is appropriate for supporting real-time traf fic with strict QoS requirements in wireless ATM networks. As the channel B ER in wireless environments is very high and varying 10(-5)-10(-2), previou s schemes that use powerful FEC have combated to overcome this noisy channe l condition at the cost of valuable bandwidth. As most previous works have been dedicated to maximize the channel efficiency, they were not able to me et QoS requirements of real-time applications in wireless networks. A new M AC protocol proposed in this paper is designed to guarantee the throughput requested by a real-time traffic user while keeping the bandwidth consumpti on at a minimum. The proposed scheme is for a TDMA system and uses adaptive FEC. We analyze the wireless channel and model it as a two-state error con trol system to design an efficient MAC protocol. We use simulation experime nts to show how the proposed scheme provides QoS guarantees, and compare it with the CDMA system in terms of capacity, i.e. the number of users that c an be supported. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.