A Modified MAC Behaviour for Multimedia Traffic in Wireless LAN for QoS Provisioning

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) developed as a simple and cost-effective wireless technology for best effort services, IEEE 802.11 has gained popularity at an unprecedented rate. However, it lacks of the capability to support Quality of Services (QoS) such as multimedia and real-time traffic properly. This paper presents a simple approach to enhance the multimedia real-time performance over the 802.11 WLAN by implementing a Quality of Service Manager (QoSM) for differentiating services with two queues on top of the 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) controller. By simulation approach the proposed scheme is remarkably effective for the multimedia real-time service (which improves in delay and throughput approximately 24 –25%) in the infrastructure-based WLAN in the coexistence with the non-real-time traffic.