Evaluation of Media Access Control (MAC) Protocols for Broadband Wireless Local Loop (BWLL) Applications and Recommended Design Improvements
Mihir Thaker, Joseph Evans, J. H. Roberts · 2000
Project Sponsor: Because of the tremendous growth of the Internet, the existing network infrastructure is unable to handle the large volume of traffic flowing across it. Advances in the field of wireless communications have yielded Broadband Wireless Local Loop (B-WLL) as a solution to alleviate the problem of providing Internet access to a large number of users for the “last mile. ” Utilization of the available bandwidth depends upon the efficiency of the Media Access Control (MAC) scheme used in B-WLL. Each application that used over the Internet has a different traffic pattern. Because of its architecture, the behavior of a given MAC protocol varies with the type of application running over it. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) can decide upon the best-suited MAC for its operation, if it has information regarding the dominant types of applications used on the Internet. This report evaluates the performance of two widely used MAC protocols, namely Reservation-TDMA (R-TDMA) and Multi-Frequency Polling (MF-Polling) based on the dominant