ENHANCED BANDWIDTH UTILIZATION IN WLAN FOR MULTIMEDIA DATA

Deployment of wireless local area networks (WLANs) is growing consistently and demanding the support of multimedia applications with acceptable quality of service (QoS). This is attracting the interest of researchers globally. Under the optimum QoS, a number of VoIP calls can be supported by a WLAN. Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and Point Coordination Function (PCF), two MAC protocols specified in the IEEE 802.11 standard have upper bound on VoIP connections. Under DCF mode 12 calls and in 20 calls in PCF mode[1,2,3,4]. In this paper we are proposing an access media mechanism in which audio data is transmitted in PCF mode and best-effort traffic in DCF mode. In the proposed access media mechanism, polling list is dynamically updated so that only those stations are polled which have voice packets ready to transmit. We have proposed a multi-queued MAC architecture for the access point. We considered voice traffic in CBR mode. The simulation results show that the maximum number of VoIP calls supported by 802.11b is 26 and 14 when inter arrival time for voice packets is 20 ms and 14 ms respectively