On Scheduling of Multimedia Services in a Low-power Mac for Wireless Atm Networks

This paper describes the design and analysis of the scheduling algorithm for EC-MAC (energy conserving medium access control) [1], a low-power medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless and mobile ATM networks. Based on the structure of EC-MAC and the characteristics of wireless channel, we propose a new algorithm which can deal with the bursty errors and the location-dependent errors. Most scheduling algorithms proposed for either wired or wireless networks were analyzed with homogeneous traffic or multimedia services with simplified traffic models. We analyze our scheduling algorithm with more realistic multimedia traffic models. One of the key goals of the scheduling algorithm is simplicity and fast implementation. Unlike the time-stamp based algorithm, our algorithm does not need to sort the virtual time, thus reducing the complexity of the algorithm significantly.