A survey of wireless ATM MAC protocols

Recently there has been a considerable research interest in the next generation mobile networks. The new networks promises to be able to handle multi-service (voice, data, video) traffic. For fixed networks ATM is considered as the enabling technology for this traffic, so to ease the transition, as well as aid simple interworking, it is natural to use ATM for the mobile network as well. To support mobile applications ATM has to be extended with mobility support, a logical link layer, and a medium access control layer. This paper concentrates on medium access control issues, such as handling the different ATM services (CBR, VBR, ABR and UBR) with their different performance requirements. This paper presents a survey of the current literature on MAC protocols and reports on the latest standardisation attempts. The authors present some known, and suggest several new, requirements on ATM MAC protocols. Furthermore a set of attributes suitable for describing generic MAC protocols are developed. Using these requirements and attributes, the most promising protocol proposals are compared and their respective technical merits are evaluated. Finally, a model for simulating MAC protocols on the broadcast radio medium is proposed and some preliminary results are reported and commented on.