Designing and prototyping a wireless point-to-point link with multimedia application support

We present a wireless point-to-point link prototype that provides multimedia application support. A point-to-point link is the most fundamental form of computer communication that is used to interconnect several components of a network ranging from connections between a pair of desktop computers to connections between local area networks. Supporting multimedia on a wireless point-to-point link can enable the use of multimedia across wired and wireless QoS LANs connected with such links thus providing a wider range of QoS coverage. We describe an adaptive medium access control (MAC) protocol that makes bandwidth considerations for such multimedia applications. To demonstrate our idea, we have constructed a prototype that can be used with existing off the shelf applications. We present the prototype architecture and we report on our initial results and experiences