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 forward error control (FEC), which is appropriate for supporting real-time traffic with strict QoS requirements in wireless ATM networks. As the channel BER in wireless environments is very high and varying 10⁻⁵–10⁻², previous schemes that use powerful FEC have combated to overcome this noisy channel condition at the cost of valuable bandwidth. As most previous works have been dedicated to maximize the channel efficiency, they were not able to meet QoS requirements of real-time applications in wireless networks. A new MAC protocol proposed in this paper is designed to guarantee the throughput requested by a real-time traffic user while keeping the bandwidth consumption 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 control system to design an efficient MAC protocol. We use simulation experiments 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 can be supported.