A hybrid medium access control protocol for wireless LANs

Author

Natarajan, K.S.

Author_Institution

IBM Thomas J. Watson Res. Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

fYear

1992

fDate

25-26 Jun 1992

Firstpage

134

Lastpage

137

Abstract

The author describes a medium access control protocol for efficient use of the radio channel in a cell. Channel time is structured as a sequence of frames of equal duration. The MAC protocol is a hybrid of centrally scheduled, contention-free data transfer (reservation-based) and decentralized, contention-based (slotted-ALOHA) protocols. The protocol relies on the use of broadcast messages from a central controller that demarcates contention-free intervals and the contention-based intervals in a frame. An adaptively movable boundary separates the contention-free and contention-based portions in each frame. This provides for flexibility of bandwidth allocation to meet a variety of asynchronous and isochronous services that are anticipated in future wireless LAN applications

Keywords

cellular radio; local area networks; multi-access systems; packet radio networks; protocols; MAC protocol; cellular network; contention-free data transfer; hybrid medium access control protocol; slotted-ALOHA; wireless LAN; Access protocols; Bandwidth; Base stations; Broadcasting; Centralized control; Local area networks; Media Access Protocol; Physical layer; Wireless LAN; Wireless application protocol;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Wireless Communications, 1992. Conference Proceedings., 1992 IEEE International Conference on Selected Topics in

Conference_Location

Vancouver, BC

Print_ISBN

0-7803-0723-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICWC.1992.200731

Filename

200731