Modified MAC for Multimedia Wireless LAN Architecture

IEEE 802.11 has gained popularity at an unprecedented rate as a simple and cost effective wireless technology for best-effort service. However, it lacks of the capability to support Quality of Services 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 controller. The proposed scheme is verified with the help of ns-2 and an improved performance for multimedia real-time service in the infrastructure-based WLAN with the coexistence of the non-real time traffic.