Integrated wireless access for videoconference from MPEG-4 and H.263 video coders with voice, E-mail, and web traffic

In this paper, a new medium access control protocol for wireless communications, named Multimedia Integration Multiple Access Control (MI-MAC), is presented and investigated. We explore, via an extensive simulation study, the performance of MI-MAC when integrating voice, e-mail data, and web packet traffic with either MPEG-4 or H.263 videoconference streams over a noisy wireless channel of high capacity. Our scheme, one of the first in the literature that considers the integration of MPEG-4 or H.263 streams with other types of packet traffic over wireless networks, achieves high aggregate channel throughput in all cases of traffic load, while preserving the quality of service (QoS) requirements of each traffic type.