Converging Voice, Video and Data in WLAN with QoS Support

Providing quality of service (QoS) for converging traffic in wireless local area network (WLAN) is still a major issue for the researchers and industries. Due to the limited bandwidth and exposure to unpredictable interferences in a wireless environment, efficient management and optimization of the access protocols are essential to provide acceptable QoS for real-time traffic and fairness to best-effort traffic. In this paper, we investigate the throughput and delay performance of the legacy IEEE 802.11 and the 802.11e when carrying converging data in WLAN. We evaluate our recently proposed protocol known as wireless token network protocol (WTN) and show that WTN successfully increases performance of converging traffic in WLAN by, first, decreasing the size of the frames and subframes of the MAC header, and second, by implementing centralized polling to reduce collisions of packets.