Multimedia—MAC Protocol: Its Performance Analysis and Applications for WDM Networks

Multimedia—MAC Protocol: Its Performance Analysis and Applications for WDM Networks The design of the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the most crucial aspect for high-speed and high-performance Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANs/MAN's) since the decisions made at this level determines the major functional characteristics of these networks. Most of the MAC protocols proposed in literature are not suitable for multimedia applications since they have been designed with one generic traffic type in mind. As a result, they perform quite well for the traffic types they have been designed for, but poorly for other traffic streams with different characteristics. In this paper, we propose an integrated MAC protocol (herein termed as Multimedia Medium Access Control protocol (Multimedia -MAC) which integrates different MAC protocols into a hybrid protocol in a shared medium network to efficiently accommodate various types of multimedia traffic streams with different characteristics and QoS demands, namely, a constant-bit-rate (CBR) traffic, bursty traffic (say, variable-bit-rate (VBR) traffic) and emergency messages (say, control messages). We have developed a mathematical framework for the analysis and performance evaluation of our Multimedia-MAC protocol which involves a queueing system with vacation. We have applied our Multimedia-MAC design approach to a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network and evaluated its performance under various traffic conditions.