Data link control protocol for wireless ATM networks with adaptive coding rate

In this paper, we propose a new data link control protocol for wireless ATM networks. This new protocol can support both real time and non-real-time services by adopting different error control mechanisms. For real time traffic, only forward error control (FEC) is used for error correction. For non-real-time traffic, a hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme is adopted to reduce the cell loss ratio to a minimum level. In both the FEC and hybrid ARQ schemes, the coding rate is adapted to the channel conditions. When the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is high, the coding rate may be higher; while when the channel is bad, the coding rate is adjusted to be lower. The automatic coding rate adaptiveness guarantees the high utilization of the scarce wireless channel resources.