Supporting Real-Time Multimedia Traffic in a Wireless LANs

This paper presents a new dynamically adaptable polling scheme for efficient support of real-time traffic over an IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN network. The poll scheduling plays an important role in IEEE 802.11 PCF. However, the current version of the polling list management scheme proposed in the IEEE 802.11 standard is inefficient when a variable number of mobile stations have variable packets to transmit. If Point Coordinator has an exact information on the station status, it is possible to efficiently perform polling. In this paper, we suggest an adaptable polling scheme to meet requirements of the stations. In our scheme, each station transmits packets including a piggyback information to inform that it wants to receive a poll in the next polling duration. Simulation results indicate that our scheme may reduces the packet discard ratio and real-time packet transfer delay.