On Handling Real-Time Communications in MAC Protocols

In this paper, we present a critical study of two real time medium access control protocols: the reservation protocol of IEEE802.5, and the timed token protocol. First of all, the reservation protocol of IEEE802.5 suffers from the lower priority messages that may experience starvation, which is caused by large amounts of enqueued higher-priority packets. To solve that, we propose a protocol that allows the transmission of low priority messages after a high priority message. Secondly, our improved timed token protocol [1] suffers from the high number of enqueued non real-time messages. Facing this problem, we propose a new version that allows the transmission of non real-time messages without waiting the next token arrival. Simulation results show the robustness of our proposed solutions.