HAMAC: An adaptive channel access protocol for multimedia wireless networks

This paper proposes a new medium access control (MAC) protocol for future wireless multimedia personal communication systems, denoted the hybrid and adaptive multiple access control (HAMAC) protocol. The HAMAC protocol integrates fixed assignment TDMA protocols, reservation-based protocols, and contention-based protocols into a single wireless network so as to simultaneously and efficiently support various classes of traffic such as constant-bit rate (CBR), variable-bit rate (VBR), and available-bit rate (ABR) traffic. In particular, 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 serve voice and CBR traffic 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 traffic with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements and outperforms state-of-the-art PRMA-like protocols. As a result, the HAMAC protocol appears to be a good candidate for future generation multimedia personal communication systems.