Emerging multimedia and interactive network applications, such as video distribution, computer imaging, distributed scientific computation and visualization, and multimedia conferencing, are accelerating the demand for high-speed and high-performance Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANs/MANs) that can support a wide range of traffic streams with different transmissions characteristics. If these networks are capable of supporting these important applications, they must not only operate at a higher data rate, but they must also offer new capabilities such as providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Most of the networks proposed for such an environment (i.e., LANs and MANs) are based on shared medium networks. Consequently, the design of the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol...[ Read more ]

Emerging multimedia and interactive network applications, such as video distribution, computer imaging, distributed scientific computation and visualization, and multimedia conferencing, are accelerating the demand for high-speed and high-performance Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANs/MANs) that can support a wide range of traffic streams with different transmissions characteristics. If these networks are capable of supporting these important applications, they must not only operate at a higher data rate, but they must also offer new capabilities such as providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Most of the networks proposed for such an environment (i.e., LANs and MANs) are based on shared medium networks. Consequently, the design of the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the most crucial aspect for these networks since the decisions made at this level will determine the major functional characteristics of the network and set the upper limits of its capabilities in general. Moreover, it is the MAC protocol that determines, in strong part, the hardware cost of these networks. As a result, researchers have recently proposed a plethora of MAC protocols for future generation LANs/MANs. Unfortunately, most of these protocols are not suitable for multimedia applications because they have been designed with one generic traffic type in mind. As a result, they perform quite well for the traffic types they have been designed for, but poorly for other traffic streams with different characteristics.

The objective of this thesis is to propose a methodology and framework for integrating different MAC protocols into a single shared medium network to efficiently accommodate various types of multimedia traffic streams with different characteristics and QoS demands. In particular, we propose an integrated MAC protocol which is termed Multimedia Medium Access Control (Multimedia-MAC) protocol that can efficiently and simultaneously serve three types of multimedia traffic streams: A constant-bit-rate (CBR) traffic and two classes of variable-bit-rate (VBR) traffic, which can cover almost all typical communication traffic types.

We have developed a priority queuing system with vacation model to establish a mathematical framework for the analysis and performance evaluation of our Multimedia-MAC protocol besides using extensive computer simulations. The main purpose of our performance analysis and evaluation is to assess our Multimedia-MAC protocol in its provision of QoS guarantees under a variety of realistic traffic and networking parameters. Further more, we propose an efficient approximation approach to numerically resolve this complicated model, which leads to an additional benefit from the use of this model. That is, we can use this model to estimate the QoS for the multimedia streams on given shared medium networks. This estimation results in more efficient admission control which is built-up on the basis of Multimedia-MAC protocol.

We have applied our Multimedia-MAC design approach and performance evaluation schemes to two widely different networks: A wavelength division multiplexing network and a wireless network. We show that our Multimedia-MAC protocol design approach is general enough to be used in various shared medium networks. We also show that our Multimedia-MAC protocol is able to satisfy the QoS requirements of various mixes of multimedia traffic streams and outperforms state-of-the-art MAC protocols. We also illustrate the usefulness of our analytical model in assessing the QoS provision of our Multimedia-MAC protocol under a semi-dynamic traffic environment.