Performance Evaluation of the Enhanced MI-MAC Protocol for Multimedia Integration over Wireless Cellular Networks

Abstract

In recent work (Koutsakis et al., IEEE Trans Veh Technol 54(5):1863-1874, 2005, we have introduced multimedia integration multiple access control protocol (MI-MAC). The protocol was shown to achieve superior performance in comparison to other protocols of the literature when integrating various types of multimedia traffic over wireless cellular networks. In this work we enhance the scheduling scheme of MI-MAC by adding three important parameters into its study. These are: (a) the handling of handoff traffic, (b) per user varying channel conditions in the uplink and downlink channels and (c) video sources' contention for channel resources. These parameters are added in order to evaluate the protocol under a significantly more realistic wireless cellular network scenario. New scheduling ideas are proposed in order to efficiently incorporate the new parameters into the scheme. The evaluation, conducted by comparing the enhanced MI-MAC with another efficient protocol of the literature and with an "ideal" MAC protocol, focuses on the efficient transmission of MPEG-4 video traffic and shows that our scheme achieves excellent performance results.