With the rapid development of INTERNET and high speed ATM networks, people pay much attention on packet switched access when setting up a wireless local area network. Information sources of diverse rate such as video, text, voice, fax, E-mail are packetized in order to flow through the packet switched networks. Traditional circuit switched access does not performance efficiently for bursty packet traffic nature. As a result, a packet-based wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that can support information of diverse rate is essential for a wireless LAN. Packet Reservation Multiple Access (PRMA) is a potential candidate for the a 3^rd generation wireless LAN that support multimedia information. The user capacity of a PRMA LAN is high because it can take the advantage of statistica...[ Read more ]

With the rapid development of INTERNET and high speed ATM networks, people pay much attention on packet switched access when setting up a wireless local area network. Information sources of diverse rate such as video, text, voice, fax, E-mail are packetized in order to flow through the packet switched networks. Traditional circuit switched access does not performance efficiently for bursty packet traffic nature. As a result, a packet-based wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that can support information of diverse rate is essential for a wireless LAN. Packet Reservation Multiple Access (PRMA) is a potential candidate for the a 3^rd generation wireless LAN that support multimedia information. The user capacity of a PRMA LAN is high because it can take the advantage of statistical multiplexing gain from bursty packet traffic. However, the potential of conventional PRMA is not fully released.

We propose methods of improving the performance (e.g. packet delay, packet drops, user capacity) of PRMA under various traffic conditions. Since data traffic is becoming as important as voice traffic, we analyze a PRMA data LAN with our proposed mathematical model. We also use computer simulations to study the performance of a PRMA data LAN. As it is getting common that voice and data traffic co-exist in the same wireless LAN, we propose a new voice/data PRMA protocol, which use dynamic transmission probability and gives speech users a higher priority and data users reservation, can improve both the performance of data and voice traffic. Computer simulations have proven that our proposed protocol can introduce data users into the LAN without disturbing the performance of speech users very much. Our PRMA implementation proposals perform better than conventional PRMA in many ways.