An efficient media access control protocol for delay sensitive bursty data in broadband wireless networks

Media access control (MAC) for broadband wireless networks is a hard and important problem. Previous studies on this problem suggested using reservations and demand assignments, i.e., mobile terminals (MTs) send requests to the base station (they may contend with each other for the access) to reserve transmission resources (time slots, codes, etc.) when they have data to send. These protocols may cause degradation of QoS, due to the fact that MTs could fail frequently competing for the access. Especially, these protocols can not meet the QoS requirements of delay sensitive and bursty data. We propose a novel MAC protocol which uses transmission collision as a useful information for random access. Analysis shows it overcomes the above mentioned problem (and thus guarantees better QoS) while consuming less wireless resources and system overhead