<p>IEEE 802.11 [1]is the standard that has emerged as a prevailing technology for the wireless local area networks. It can be considered the wireless version of Ethernet, which supports best-effortservice. IEEE is developing a new standard called 802.11e to be able to provide quality of service (QoS) in WLANs. Two possible methods have been proposed in [3]in order to improve the performance of service differentiation in the MAC layer. They are called PCWA (Practical Contention Window Adjustment) and AIPM (Adaptive Initiative Polling Machine). In this thesis, I will analyse both methods and propose new ideas to improve their performance, simulating the ideas concerning PCWA. Simulations show better general performance, especially for highest priorities flows, although the behaviour of the lowest priority one is reduced.</p>

<p>Nowadays Wireless LAN is playing a more and more important role in network systems. After 1999, in which the IEEE organization published its Wireless Local Network standard 802.11[1], many people saw the advantages of the standard but also the lack of support for multimedia streaming. A lot of research work has been done on the proposed IEEE 802.11e standard draft during the past 4 years. It is supposed to be able to fully support Quality of Service. The final version will be published early in 2004. In my thesis, I propose two possible methods to improve the performance of service differentiation in the MAC layer. The first one is calledPCWA (Practical Contention Window Adjustment). It is a method with which the station finds a best size of its contention window when running the EDCF (Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function) access method. It helps to improve the total system throughput, the jitter and the delay of traffics with different priorities. The second method is called AIPM (Adaptive Initiative Polling Machine). It uses the polling mechanism for differential service, intelligently arranging the polling time to reduce the delay as much as possible, achieving large improvement in performance. This method significantly increases the total system throughput, while the delay and jitter of the traffics are very much small in comparison to EDCF.</p>

IEEE 802.11 [1]is the standard that has emerged as a prevailing technology for the wireless local area networks. It can be considered the wireless version of Ethernet, which supports best-effortservice. IEEE is developing a new standard called 802.11e to be able to provide quality of service (QoS) in WLANs. Two possible methods have been proposed in [3]in order to improve the performance of service differentiation in the MAC layer. They are called PCWA (Practical Contention Window Adjustment) and AIPM (Adaptive Initiative Polling Machine). In this thesis, I will analyse both methods and propose new ideas to improve their performance, simulating the ideas concerning PCWA. Simulations show better general performance, especially for highest priorities flows, although the behaviour of the lowest priority one is reduced.

Nowadays Wireless LAN is playing a more and more important role in network systems. After 1999, in which the IEEE organization published its Wireless Local Network standard 802.11[1], many people saw the advantages of the standard but also the lack of support for multimedia streaming. A lot of research work has been done on the proposed IEEE 802.11e standard draft during the past 4 years. It is supposed to be able to fully support Quality of Service. The final version will be published early in 2004. In my thesis, I propose two possible methods to improve the performance of service differentiation in the MAC layer. The first one is calledPCWA (Practical Contention Window Adjustment). It is a method with which the station finds a best size of its contention window when running the EDCF (Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function) access method. It helps to improve the total system throughput, the jitter and the delay of traffics with different priorities. The second method is called AIPM (Adaptive Initiative Polling Machine). It uses the polling mechanism for differential service, intelligently arranging the polling time to reduce the delay as much as possible, achieving large improvement in performance. This method significantly increases the total system throughput, while the delay and jitter of the traffics are very much small in comparison to EDCF.