Abstract
A new medium access control (MAC) protocol for mobile wireless communications is presented and investigated. We explore, via an extensive simulation study, the performance of the protocol when integrating voice and data traffic over a wireless channel of medium capacity (referring mostly to outdoor microcellular environments). Data message arrivals are assumed to occur according to a Poisson process and to vary in length according to a geometric distribution. We evaluate the voice packet dropping probability and access delay, as well as the data packet access and data message transmission delays for various voice and data load conditions. By combining two novel ideas of ours with a useful idea which has been proposed in other MAC schemes, we obtain very good voice sources multiplexing results along with most satisfactory voice and data performance and quality of service (QoS) requirements servicing. This is demonstrated by the nature of our results, as well as by the comparison of both the concepts and the results of our scheme to those of MAC schemes which were recently introduced in the literature.