Design and performance evaluation of a MAC protocol for wireless local area networks

We propose and analyze, from a performance viewpoint, a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The protocol, named Prioritized-Access with Centralized-Control (PACC), supports integrated traffics by guaranteeing an almost complete utilization of network resources. The proposed protocol combines random access for signalling, with collision-free access to the transmission channel. The transmission channel is assumed to be slotted, with slots grouped into frames. Access to transmission slots is controlled by a centralized scheduler which manages a multiclass queue containing the users' requests to access the transmission channel. Three classes of users are assumed: voice traffic (voice), data traffic with real-time constraints (high-priority data), and classical data traffic (low-priority data). A priority mechanism ensures that speech users have the highest priority in accessing the idle slots, since speech packets have a more demanding delay constraint. The remaining channel bandwidth is shared fairly among the high-priority data terminals. The low-priority data terminals use the slots left empty by the other classes. Specifically, access to transmission slots is controlled by the centralized scheduler by managing a transmission cycle for each class of terminals. The voice-terminals cycle has a constant length equal to one frame, while the lengths of the data-terminals cycles are random variables which depend on the number of active voice and data terminals. In this paper we show that the proposed scheme can support the same maximum number of voice terminals as an ideal scheduler, while guaranteeing an almost complete utilization of network capacity. In addition, via a performance analysis, we verify that by limiting the number of real-time data terminals in the network this class of traffic can be statistically guaranteed access delays in the order of 200–300 msec. Hence, the QoS the network gives to the real-time data terminals makes this service suitable for real-time applications such as alarms or low bit rate video.