Performance analysis of the packetized voice transmission with PCF in an IEEE 802.11 infrastructure wireless LAN

The IEEE 802.11 standard supports the coexistence of asynchronous and time-bounded traffic by use of the two modes of medium access control (MAC) protocol termed as DCF (distributed coordination function) and PCF (point coordination function) respectively. The former is a random access scheme originally designed for delay-insensitive data applications, and the latter is based on polling mechanism which is more suitable for real-time services such as voice and video etc. In this paper, we focus on the performance of the packetized voice transmission using PCF mode in IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN while the DCF mode is used to provide minimum bandwidth available for data transfers. The effect of fragmentation threshold, echo cancellation and burst errors on network performance is theoretically analyzed.