HAMAC: An Adaptive Channel Access Protocol for Multime Networks*
Lixin Wang, Mounir Hamdi · 1998
This paper proposes a new medium access protocol (MAC) protocol for future wireless multimedia personal communication systems, denoted hybrid and adaptive multiple access control (HA MAC) protocol. The HA MAC protocol integrates fixed assignment TDMA protocols, reservation-based protocols, and contention-based protocols into a single wireless network so as to simultaneously and eficiently support various classes of trajic such as constant-bit rate (CBR), variable-bit rate (VBR), and available-bit rate (ABR) trafic. In particulal; the HAMAC protocol uses a novel preservation slot technique to overcome the packet contention overhead in packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) like protocols, while keeping most isochronous service features of TDMA protocols to sene voice and CBR trafic streams. We have analyzed the performance of the HAMAC protocol using extensive simulations. The results show that the HAMAC protocol can achieve very low loss rates for various multimedia trajic with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements and outpevforms state-of-the-art PRMA-like protocols. As a result, the HAMACprotocol appears to be a good candidate for future generation multimedia personal communication systems.