A wireless multimedia LAN architecture using DCF with shortened contention window for QoS provisioning

In this paper, we propose a MAC architecture for IEEE 802.11-like WLANs supporting multimedia services. The main characteristics of the proposed MAC procedure are the period restriction and DCF/SC (distributed coordination function with shortened contention-windows) instead of the PCF (point coordination function) of the IEEE 802.11 standards. We investigate the performance of the proposed MAC mechanism in terms of utilization, throughput, latency and jitter under two multimedia network environments considered by the IEEE 802.11-task group E. These environments are home and enterprise. In the simulated performance, this novel approach, which preserves the traffic classification but increases the channel utilization, thus guarantees QoS (quality of service) of multimedia traffic.