An adaptive reservation scheme for VBR voice traffic in wireless ATM networks

A reservation scheme, named dynamic hybrid partitioning, is proposed for the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol of wireless ATM (WATM) networks operating in Time Division Duplex (TDD) mode. The goal is to improve the performance of the real-time Variable Bit Rate (VBR) voice traffic in networks with mixed voice/data traffic. In most proposed MAC protocols for WATM networks, the reservation phase treats all traffic equally, whether delay-sensitive or not. Hence, delay-sensitive VBR traffic sources have to compete for reservation each time they wake up from idle mode. This causes large and variable channel access delays, and increases the delay and delay variation (jitter) experienced by ATM cells of VBR traffic. In the proposed scheme, the reservation phase of the MAC protocol is dynamically divided into a contention-free partition for delay-sensitive idle VBR traffic, and a contention partition for other traffic. Adaptive algorithms dynamically adjust the partition sizes to minimize the channel bandwidth overhead. Simulation results show that the delay performance of delay-sensitive VBR traffic is improved while minimizing the overhead.