A MAC protocol for wireless access to ATM networks

This paper presents a TDMA-based MAC algorithm for wireless-ATM systems, able to deal with heterogeneous traffic. Attention focuses on a random access methodology based on reservation, and a channel handling policy exploiting dynamic resource allocation. Further features of the proposed MAC are: the use of piggyback and control mini-slots to handle rt-VBR traffic, a reservation sub-frame which dynamically changes its dimension, and, most important, a resource allocation strategy based on the value of an urgency index, which takes into account the maximum allowed delay for each type of traffic in the system. The MAC algorithm behaviour is compared with that of alternative schemes, based just on the estimation of the terminal buffer sizes. A better performance is found for different traffic load conditions