Analysis of MAC protocols for wireless-ATM networks

This paper focuses on the analysis of two classes of TDMA-based MAC algorithms for wireless-ATM networks: the urgency-based class, scheduling the bandwidth requests on the basis of their urgency, and the buffer-based class, relying on the estimation of the queue length in the mobile terminals. The main features of the proposed urgency-based algorithms are: contention-based DAMA access, dynamic adaptation of reservation bandwidth, use of piggybacking and control mini-slots to handle real-time VBR traffic, and a scheduling mechanism based on the expiry time of the buffered cells. These aspects contribute to the better performance of urgency-based algorithms in handling heterogeneous traffic when compared to the buffer-based ones