Performance comparison of two MAC protocols for wireless ATM networks

The combination of wireless communications and ATM especially in local-area environments, can provide freedom of mobility with QoS guarantees. An important system design issue for wireless ATM systems is the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for the radio interface. This protocol should be able to support all ATM services with often conflicting requirements, and guarantee the required QoS for each connection. It should also guarantee fairness and allocate bandwidth efficiently and dynamically. Two MAC protocols (dynamic slot assignment (DSA++) and mobile access scheme based on contention and reservation for ATM (MASCARA)) are promising candidates for HIPERLAN Type 2. Both of these MAC protocols use a combination of contention and reservation access on the physical channel. This paper compares the performance of these two MAC protocols