MAC protocol for wireless ATM: contention free versus contention based transmission of reservation requests

In general, the users of wireless ATM terminals request the same functionality and quality of service as users of wired terminals. These user requirements can be transformed into the demand for building an ATM multiplexer around the air interface which is characterized by a radio channel inside the ATM layer. The main difference between this logical ATM multiplexer around the air interface and a normal ATM multiplexer is the distribution of the multiplexing function between wireless terminals and the base station. For the uplink this requires a frequent notification of the ATM cell scheduler in the base station about the status of the incoming queues inside the wireless terminals. This paper focuses on different transmission methods for transmitting capacity request messages (also designated as reservation request) over the uplink