Packetized voice transmission using RT-MAC, a wireless real-time medium access control protocol

  • Authors:
  • Rusty O. Baldwin;Nathaniel J. Davis, IV;Scott F. Midkiff;Richard A. Raines

  • Affiliations:
  • Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA;Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

RT-MAC is a simple, elegant, and robust medium access control (MAC) protocol for use in transmitting real-time data in point-to-point ad hoc wireless local area networks (WLANs). Our enhancement of IEEE 802.11, real-time MAC (RT-MAC), dramatically reduces missed deadlines and packet collisions while increasing throughput by selectively discarding packets and sharing station state information. For example, RT-MAC is able to successfully transmit 40 2-way voice conversations in addition to a normalized offered load of 80%. IEEE 802.11 is only able to transmit 10 2-way conversations under the same conditions. In another instance, RT-MAC reduced packet collisions from 50% to less than 15% while increasing throughput by more than 50%. Herein we extend our previous performance analysis of RT-MAC to include integrated voice-data transmission. Stations using RT-MAC are interoperable with stations using IEEE 802.11 and show a significant performance improvement even when a minority of stations in the network employ RT-MAC.