TUTMAC: a medium access control protocol for a new multimedia wireless local area network

This paper presents a medium access control (MAC) protocol called TUTMAC for a new wireless local area network (TUTWLAN). The design objective has been to develop a simple, multimedia service capable protocol that provides sufficient medium utilisation efficiency and guarantees QoS (quality of service) parameters. The developed system utilises a centralised (base station controlled) network architecture. A limited number of portable stations can be associated with the same base station, i.e. in the same TUTWLAN cell. TUTMAC is connection oriented: the bandwidth is allocated deploying constant bit-rate TDMA based data channels that are reserved by exchanging short control messages. The connection parameters can be dynamically altered during the data exchange session. Currently, a TUTWLAN prototype is being developed comprising both TUTMAC software and platform hardware modules. The prototype will support up to eight simultaneous data-transfer connections each having 64 to 512 kbit/s data transmission bandwidth.