Towards an Efficient Reservation Algorithm for Distributed Reservation Protocols

With the proliferation of wireless technologies and the convenience they offer, transporting Quality-of-Service (QoS) demanding traffic such as compressed video over wireless links becomes a trend and a challenging issue. Among many factors, Media Access Control (MAC) protocols play an important role in the network stack to ensure the QoS provisioning for multimedia applications and the efficient utilization of wireless channels. Various contention-based or contention-free MAC protocols have been proposed to solve these problems. In this paper, we model, analyze with an existing framework, and evaluate two reservation algorithms, subframe-fit and isozone-fit, proposed for distributed reservation protocols exampled by WiMedia UWB MAC. The models have been validated by extensive simulations using ns-2 and an MPEG-4 traffic generator. We further improve the system performance by introducing cross-isozone allocation and on-demand compaction to isozone-fit, and discuss how to leverage both contention-based and contention-free MAC protocols.