Media Access Control for Real-Time Communications in Consumer Electronics Networks

An ultimate goal for medium access control is freedom from collision. For applications or consumer electronics with real-time constraints, quality-of-service (QoS) supports are also of critical importance and can be realized based on reservation or prioritization techniques. In a license-free distributed environment where no single authority for channel arbitration exists, reservation is not a suitable paradigm while prioritization may not provide the degree of QoS required. As a result, effective prioritization in such environments is still a subject under intensive research, in order to make sure that higher-priority packets can be transmitted without being affected by lower-priority packets. Fairness can then be provisioned on top of the strong differentiation capability. In this paper, we propose a medium access control (MAC) scheme that is ideal for communications between a master node (e.g., PC) and slave nodes (e.g., consumer electronics) or in a home network with a centralized router. The proposed scheme leads to freedom from collision and strong differentiation capability, and the hidden and exposed terminal problems naturally do not exist.