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Abstract

A reservation-based wireless asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) local area network includes a system architecture of mobile nodes (MNs), each MN for communicating with various ones of the other MNs. A plurality of services is supported wherein each service has respective quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. A medium access control (MAC) layer using a reservation-based communications protocol is provided, wherein the protocol divides all MAC-based communications between a control channel and a data channel, the control channel and the data channel together making up a control-data superframe (CDS). The protocol further utilizes the control channel for allocating a bandwidth of the data channel to each service. The control channel includes a control frame during which an allocation of data payload slots of the data channel is determined according to (a) a long-term strategy corresponding to a time of service required to complete a service over multiple CDS frames and (b) a short-term strategy within a CDS frame corresponding to instantaneous data payload slot requirements for a particular service. Respective QoS requirements of each service are thus achieved.

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