A unified wireless LAN architecture for real-time and non-real-time communication services

Abstract

This paper addresses how to support both real-time and non-real-time communication services in a wireless LAN with dynamic time-division duplexed (D-TDD) transmission. With D-TDD, a frequency channel is time-shared for both downlink and uplink transmissions under the dynamic access control of the base station. The base station (1) handles uplink transmissions by polling mobiles in a certain order determined on a per-connection (per-message) basis for transmitting real-time (non-real-time) traffic from mobiles and (2) schedules the transmission of downlink packets. To handle location-dependent, time-varying, and bursty errors, we adopt the channel-state prediction, transmission deferment, and retransmission. We consider the problems of scheduling and multiplexing downlink packet transmissions, and polling mobiles for uplink transmissions depending on the channel state. We also establish conditions necessary to admit each new real-time connection by checking if the connection's delivery-delay bound can be guaranteed as long as the channel stays in good condition without compromising any of the existing guarantees. Last, the performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated to demonstrate how the protocol works and to study the effects of various parameters of the protocol.