Multiservice Communications over TDMA/TDD Wireless LANs

In recent years, several wireless LAN technologies making use of TDMA/TDD MAC have been designed. In this type of environment, there is the need for a central controller responsible for allocating the bandwidth among all the active mobile terminals. In order to properly carry out this task, the use of simple but effective signaling and bandwidth allocation mechanisms is a must. In this way, the mobile terminals can let the controller know their needs in terms of the bandwidth to be allocated. In turn, the central controller has to properly allocate the available bandwidth among all the competing mobiles taking into account their QoS requirements. In this work, we undertake the design and performance evaluation of the signaling protocols and bandwidth allocation mechanisms. We have paid particular attention to studying the amount of overhead introduced by these mechanisms: an important feature when designing control mechanisms for wireless environments. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes when supporting a multi-service environment comprising four types of services: video, voice, best-effort and background.