This brief focuses on medium access control (MAC) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), and presents VeMAC, a novel MAC scheme based on distributed time division multiple access (TDMA) for VANETs. The performance of VeMAC is evaluated via mathematical analysis and computer simulations in comparison with other existing MAC protocols, including the IEEE 802.11p standard. This brief aims at proposing TDMA as a suitable MAC scheme for VANETs, which can support the quality-of-service requirements of high priority VANET applications.

This Springer Brief investigates the voice and elastic/interactive data service support over cognitive radio networks (CRNs), in terms of their delay requirements. The increased demand for wireless communication conflicts with the scarcity of the radio spectrum, but CRNS allow for more efficient use of the networks. The authors review packet level delay requirements of the voice service and session level delay requirements of the elastic/interactive data services, particularly constant-rate and on-off voice traffic capacities in CRNs with centralized and distributed network coordination. Some generic channel access schemes are considered as the coordination mechanism, and call admission control algorithms are developed for non-fully-connected CRNs. Other key topics include the advantages of supporting voice traffic flows with different delay requirements, the mean response time of the elastic data traffic over a centralized CRN, and effects of the traffic load at the base station and file length (service time requirement) distribution on the mean response time. The brief is designed for professionals and researchers working with wireless networks, cognitive radio, and communications. It is also a helpful reference for advanced-level students interested in efficient wireless communications.

This brief investigates distributed medium access control (MAC) with QoS provisioning for both single- and multi-hop wireless networks including wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks.

For WLANs, an efficient MAC scheme and a call admission control algorithm are presented to provide guaranteed QoS for voice traffic and, at the same time, increase the voice capacity significantly compared with the current WLAN standard. In addition, a novel token-based scheduling scheme is proposed to provide great flexibility and facility to the network service provider for service class management.

Also proposed is a novel busy-tone based distributed MAC scheme for wireless ad hoc networks and a collision-free MAC scheme for wireless mesh networks, respectively, taking the different network characteristics into consideration. The proposed schemes enhance the QoS provisioning capability to real-time traffic and, at the same time, significantly improve the system throughput and fairness performance for data traffic, as compared with the most popular IEEE 802.11 MAC scheme.


The next-generation of wireless communications are envisioned to be supported by heterogeneous networks by using various wireless access technologies. The popular cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs) present perfectly complementary characteristics in terms of service capacity, mobility support, and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. The cellular/WLAN interworking is an effective way to promote the evolution of wireless networks. Interworking of Wireless LANs and Cellular Networks focuses on three aspects, namely access selection, call admission control and load sharing to investigate heterogeneous interworking for cellular/WLAN integrated networks. It not only reveals important observations but also offers useful tools for performance evaluation. The unique traffic and network characteristics are exploited to enhance interworking effectiveness. Theoretical analysis and simulation validation demonstrate benefits of cellular/WLAN interworking in real networks. Last but not the least, this brief highlights promising future research directions to guide interested readers.