A New MAC Protocol with Pseudo-TDMA Behavior for Supporting Quality of Service in 802.11 Wireless LANs

Abstract

A new medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed for quality-of-service (QoS) support in wireless local area networks (WLAN). The protocol is an alternative to the recent enhancement 802.11e. A new priority policy provides the system with better performance by simulating time division multiple access (TDMA) functionality. Collisions are reduced and starvation of low-priority classes is prevented by a distributed admission control algorithm. The model performance is found analytically extending previous work on this matter. The results show that a better organization of resources is achieved through this scheme. Throughput analysis is verified with OPNET simulations.