Multimedia Transmission over Wireless LANs

Wireless LAN technology has shown to be a revolutionary development during the last few decades. In order to deal robustly with the unreliable wireless nature, the 802.11 medium access control protocol has a relatively large overhead and hence, the throughput performance is much worse than the underlying physical layer rate. Moreover, along with many emerging applications and services over WLANs, the demand for faster and higher capacity WLANs has been growing recently. In this paper, a new MAC protocol, Aggregated MAC scheme (AMAC), is proposed wherein, multiple packets are aggregated into and transmitted in a single large frame in order to reduce the overhead. In the network layer, a routing protocol, MRTP (multimedia route repair routing protocol), is proposed to find reliable links and to provide an efficient route repair mechanism. The implementation of these protocols reduces the number of access points required in the network.