Prioritized wireless access protocols for real-time VBR traffic

This paper presents a real-time VBR (variable bit rate) transport for next-generation multiservice personal communication networks. After discussing the characteristics of real-time VBR traffic, we propose a statistical multiplexing-based resource allocation scheme for real-time VBR traffic: “guaranteed” resources are assigned to high-priority packets, while “add-on” resources are assigned in a dynamic manner. The proposed scheme have been validated for an integrated voice/video environment, where video is encoded with a H.261-based two-layer video coder. The protocol was designed with the basic premise that there is a relatively large number of unused voice slots on average that can be used to carry “add-on” video packets. Numerical examples show that the prioritized transport under consideration can significantly improve the picture quality, and allow better utilization of wireless resources through statistical multiplexing