Further analysis and tuning of registered multi-cycle polling in wireless medium access management

Multimedia applications are supported by enhancing polling mechanisms to achieve Quality of Service, QoS, in the IEEE 802 MAC layer. We first briefly introduce the problems of reliability and efficiency with the basic polling medium access, particularly in highly loaded environments. A novel mechanism, Registered Polling is then described in details. The proposed mechanism provides a simple and efficient channel for implicit information update on traffic conditions. Based on these updates, it optimizes the actual polling order to meet the needs of multimedia applications. However, performance analysis shows dilemma between network utilization and delay bound guarantee. This motivates us to further investigate a multi-cycle enhancement. It is designed based on the detailed performance analysis on different traffic scenarios. The final scheme not only manages the network resources efficiently with total network utilization improvement but also proves us the parameterized QoS supports particularly for session-based applications.