Priority Oriented Adaptive Polling for wireless LANs

Today’s wireless LANs require efficient integration of multimedia and traditional data traffic. Multimedia network applications are time-bounded and have stricter QoS demands. The IEEE 802.11e workgroup is standardizing a new QoS enhanced access scheme for wireless networks. It is based on a mechanism called Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA). EDCA seems capable of differentiating the traffic, however, it exhibits great overhead that limits the actually available bandwidth and degrades the overall performance. This work proposes an alternative protocol which could be used in place of EDCA. The Priority Oriented Adaptive Polling (POAP) is collision free, it prioritizes the different kinds of traffic, and it is able to provide QoS for all types of multimedia network applications, while efficiently supporting background data traffic. POAP compared to EDCA, provides higher channel utilization, distributes network resources to the mobile stations adapting to their real needs, and generally exhibits superior performance.