Cognitive Access Point to Handle Delay Sensitive Traffic in WLANs

Over the last few years, the widespread use of wireless local area networks (WLANs) continues to gain more and more impetus. Due to the increase in variety of multimedia applications such as voice, video and gaming traffic, it is paramount to develop a mechanism for the quality of service (QoS) to support different types of traffic in WLAN. IEEE 802.11e was introduced to handle delay sensitive traffic using Enhance Distributed Coordination Function (EDCF) which is an extension of Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) to categorize traffic in different groups e.g. Real time and non real time traffic. In this paper, We investigate the impact of traffic handling techniques as part of medium access control (MAC) on the performance of WLAN. Firstly, we propose MAC level parameters settings, which are found the most suitable to WLAN in comparison with DCF and EDCF and then we propose a cognitive access point (CAP) which is based on novel approaches to assign proprieties on station level using the proposed algorithm and embedded Packet fragmentation technique in the Revised MAC parameters in cognitive access point mechanism. The benefits of the proposed approach is validated via experimental results using OPNET Modeler 17.5.