An adaptive ARQ enhancement to support multimedia traffic using 802.11 wireless LANs

As the demand for broadband multimedia wireless services increases, the need to provide QoS and higher data rate enhancements to the widely deployed IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard has become apparent. We propose a class-based adaptive ARQ scheme with QoS support for multimedia traffic, to facilitate higher throughputs through the reduction of MAC overhead. This scheme operates on top of the EDCA (enhanced distributed channel access) mechanism proposed in the IEEE 802.11e draft standard, which provides QoS support in the MAC layer through the use of service differentiation and traffic class prioritization. An OPNET simulation model is used to show that the proposed ARQ enhancement increases system performance.