Terminal-assisted hybrid MAC protocol for differentiated QoS guarantee in TDMA-based broadband access networks

This paper presents a terminal-assisted frame-based packet reservation multiple access (TAF-PRMA) protocol, which optimizes random access control between heterogeneous traffic aiming at more efficient voice/data integrated services in dynamic reservation TDMA-based broadband access networks. In order to achieve a differentiated quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee for individual service plus maximal system resource utilization, TAF-PRMA independently controls the random access parameters such as the lengths of the access regions dedicated to respective service traffic and the corresponding permission probabilities, on a frame-by-frame basis. In addition, we have adopted a terminal-assisted random access mechanism where the voice terminal readjusts a global permission probability from the central controller in order to handle the 'fair access' issue resulting from distributed queuing problems inherent in the access network. Our extensive simulation results indicate that TAF-PRMA achieves significant improvements in terms of voice capacity, delay, and fairness over most of the existing medium access control (MAC) schemes for integrated services.