A time multiplexing coordination mechanism on top of the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer

Abstract

A novel software-based time multiplexing (TM) coordination mechanism for the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) is proposed in this paper. By using the TM mechanism which can be easily implemented on top of the distributed coordination function (DCF) at the access point (AP) with the best features of both point coordination function (PCF) and DCF, a higher priority is naturally set to voice services over data services. Finally, our simulation results demonstrate that the TM mechanism outperforms the pure DCF and the mixture of PCF and DCF in terms of end-to-end voice delay, number of supported voice sessions, and aggregate throughput.