An efficient quality-of-service MAC protocol for infrastructure WLANs

In this paper, we propose a new efficient MAC protocol, named quality-of-service MAC (QMAC), which is an integrated solution for providing QoS guarantees to real-time multimedia applications in infrastructure WLANs. In addition, QMAC has the following attractive features: (i) its reservation scheme ensures that real-time stations enter the polling list in bounded time, (ii) it supports multiple priority levels and guarantees that high-priority stations always join the polling list earlier than low-priority stations, (iii) it employs the distributed pre-check technique such that the access point can admit as many newly flows as possible, while not violating admitted flows' guarantees, (iv) its dynamic bandwidth allocation, scheme provides real-time traffic transmission with per-flow probabilistic bandwidth assurances, and (v) it uses a, multipoll frame to poll all stations on the polling list at a time, therefore, the bandwidth can be utilized more efficient. Through simulations, we demonstrate the advantage of our QMAC. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.