A multimedia architecture for 802.11b networks

Wireless networks have become increasingly popular for the past few years, especially IEEE 802.11 as the most widespread wireless technology. This article proposes a new architecture for broadband 802.11 networks to support distributed multimedia applications. After discussing the differences between multimedia and traditional applications, we show how the 802.11b mechanism ensuring enhanced robustness connectivity for low signal to noise ratio (SNR) areas, penalizes multimedia stream transmissions. A new multimedia architecture disabling the dynamic rate shifting mechanism and using a performance enhancing proxy is then proposed.