Improvement of IEEE 802.11 for multimedia traffic in wireless LAN

In this paper, we propose to add a new queue in IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol for real-time multimedia traffic in wireless LAN. The queue contributes to improving multimedia service quality by reducing end to end delay, a QoS parameter. To control two queues, we use a scheduler based on the PAD algorithm which selects a packet from one of two queues appropriately for forwarding. Moreover, we adapt the value of random backoff in the IEEE 802.11 for multimedia packets, which reduces the channel access delay. We modify the IEEE 802.11 standard with the proposed scheme and evaluate the performance of the modified protocol. The result shows that our approach outperforms the IEEE 802.11 standard in packet loss rate and average packet delay.