A multiple access scheme for VBR traffic in broadband wireless local communication

The convergence of wireless systems with broadband services is the challenge of future generations' wireless networks. In recent years, several designs for enhancement of second-generation media access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed. They mainly focus, however, on digital voice/data scenario and are partially interested in the problem of transporting other real-time broadband traffics at the radio interface. In this work, we introduce an enhanced centrally controlled access technique for real-time broadband sources to enable full integration of wireless terminals into fixed broadband wire-line networks by realizing the statistical multiplexing of sources, keeping in mind their individual quality-of-service requirements. The technique combines random access with polling by dynamically selecting the access method with highest throughput for transmission of capacity requests to the packet scheduler running at the base station. The performance bounds of the above approach have been calculated. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.