Abstract
Design of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) needs to take into consideration the limited bandwidth available in the ISM band along with the noisy characteristics of the wireless environment and hidden terminal effects. In this paper we propose an enhancement for IEEE 802.11 standard that improves the WLAN support for multimedia applications. In the IEEE 802.11 PCF polling based protocol designed for multimedia applications support, the Point Coordinator (PC) polls each station in the Basic Service Area (BSA) individually. In the proposed SuperPoll approach the PC broadcasts at the beginning of the contention free period a SuperPoll, i.e., a message that includes the list of stations that will be polled during the current period. To improve the reliability of the polling based approach in a noisy environment, we propose to use a chaining mechanism in which each packet resends in its turn the SuperPoll message appended to its packet. We provide performance measurements of the proposed method in terms of channel efficiency and channel access time for multimedia applications that use the contention free period of IEEE 802.11 PCF. We notice that for noisy channels, the proposed method provides a dramatic throughput increase and delay decrease when compared with the Single Poll mechanism used in IEEE 802.11 PCF, thus providing better support for multimedia applications.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
B. Crow, I. Widjaja, J.G. Kim and P. Sakai, Performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks, in: SPIE Photomics, Boston, MA (November 1996).
B. Crow, I. Widjaja, J.G. Kim and P. Sakai, IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks, IEEE Comunications Magazine 35(9) (September 1997).
A. Ganz, A. Phonphoem, N. Llopis, K. Wongthavarawat and Z. Ganz, Converged voice, video, and data wired—wireless LANS testbed, in: MILCOM 1999, Atlantic City, NJ (November 1999).
IEEE 802.11 Standard, Wireless LAN (1997).
K. Pahlavan and A.H. Levesque, Wireless Information Networks (Wiley, 1995).
B. Sklar, Digital Communications: Fundamentals and Applications (Prentice Hall, 1988).
M.A. Visser and M.E. Zarki, Voice and data transmission over an 802.11 wireless network, in: Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, PIMRC'95, Vol. 2 (1995).
R.E. Ziemer and W.H. Tranter, Principles of Communications: Systems, Modulations, and Noise (Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ganz, A., Phonphoem, A. & Ganz, Z. Robust SuperPoll with Chaining Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs in Support of Multimedia Applications. Wireless Networks 7, 65–73 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009048015839
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009048015839