Supporting Real-Time Service in Packet-Switched Wireless Networks

The requirement of providing real-time data service by wireless networks is a critical issue in the design of current wireless networks. Distributed Queueing Request Update Multiple Access (DQRUMA) has been proposed as a demand assignment medium access control (MAC) protocol to efficiently control the medium sharing by multiple mobile users. With the help of a packet transmission policy, DQRUMA has a potential to provide QoS service for the time-constrained burst data traffic. In this article, we study the problem of providing real-time service to fixed-size packets with or without time constraints in wireless networks. In particular, we propose a novel scheduling scheme for the DQRUMA protocol to control the packet transmission in packet-switched wireless networks. We have conducted extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and to compare its real-time performance with those of other packet transmission policies. This study proves that the new algorithm is an efficient transmission policy for the DQRUMA to support real-time service in wireless networks.