A QoS Mechanism of Registered Multi-Cycle Polling in Wireless Medium Access Control

Abstract

Polling schemes in the IEEE 802 MAC layer provide some QoS support for multimedia applications above what can be provided with the contention scheme. However, in highly loaded environments, reliability and efficiency remain the main challenges for current detailed polling schemes. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of polling medium access, and propose a novel mechanism, the Registered Multi-cycle polling. The new scheme performs particularly well especially under heavy load situations, where QoS guarantee for session-based applications is crucial to the network performance. The scheme provides not only parameterized QoS for session-based applications, but also improves the total network utilization. These performance gains are achieved with Registered Multi-cycle scheme with the use implicit information update and Multi-cycle enhancement.