A distributed fair queuing MAC scheduler for wireless ATM network

grantor: University of TorontoA centralized wireless ATM LAN consists of a base station and multiple mobile stations. Since they share one common transmission medium, medium access control (MAC) is needed to coordinate the order of transmission. To maintain features of BISDN, the MAC has to consider a connection's Quality of Service while allocating resources. One of the proposed MAC protocols for providing wireless multiservices is called distributed fair queuing (DFQ). DFQ is a TDMA-based MAC scheme which dynamically performs per-cell scheduling based on the cell's priority. Success of implementing DFQ largely depends on scheduling efficiency. A software scheduler will not be fast enough for this real time task. Therefore, an efficient hardware scheduler is required. The major theme of this thesis is to design such a scheduler. As a second theme, it considers issues of WATM LAN system design and proposes a system architecture for implementing MAC functions using existing commercial ATM cards.M.A.Sc