Multimedia traffic support for asynchronous ad hoc wireless networks

In this paper, we address the issue of providing multimedia traffic support in asynchronous ad hoc wireless networks. Since multimedia traffic has stringent bounds on end-to-end delay, we present a resource reservation for transmitting in such traffic. The existing asynchronous MAC protocols such as RTMAC (B.S. and C. Siva Ram Murthy, August 2002) and MACA/PR (C.R. Lin and M. Gerla, March 1999) when used for multimedia traffic provide inefficient utilization of network resources and affect call acceptance ratio and call drop ratio of multimedia traffic severely. Hence in this work, we modify the RTMAC protocol for supporting multimedia traffic so that it overcomes these limitations and improves packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay of such traffic. The core concept of this protocol is a novel slot allocation strategy for efficient utilization of the available bandwidth for carrying multimedia traffic and best-effort traffic. Extensive simulations were performed to assess the performance of the protocol under varying network conditions. The simulations clearly indicate the gains in using such a slot allocation strategy for carrying multimedia traffic.