A Centralized MAC Protocol with QoS Support for Wireless LANs

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are widely used in homes and offices, as well as in public places, mainly as the last mile of an Internet connection, but also as an interconnection between different devices. This extensive usage of WLANs, with the need of modern applications (such as voice over IP) for high throughput and low transmission delays, impose the necessity for efficient protocols with quality of service (QoS) support. In previous work the ability of multi carrier-code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) based medium access control (MAC) protocols to achieve high efficiency has been demonstrated. This paper presents a MAC protocol, based on MC-CDMA that uses an access point (AP) to centrally control the network and provide QoS support. Extensive simulation results and a comparison with the standard IEEE 802.11e prove the efficiency of the proposed protocol.