The University of British Columbia

IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN is the most popular and most widely deployed Wi-Fi technology in the world. With the explosion in use of wireless networks comes the demand for them to support the latest technologies. Task group E of the 802.11 standard is working on a standard that adds quality of service enhancements in the 802.11 MAC layer by using traffic flows and prioritizing traffic according to what type of application it belongs to. There are, however, some weaknesses in the design that is currently being proposed by the 802.11 standards committee. In this paper, we propose enhancements to the IEEE 802.11 draft standard in an attempt to provide improved quality of service for all traffic priorities. Through our simulations we are able to show that we can do so without negatively affecting the performance of any of the wireless stations in the network or the traffic flows that they contain. Our results show that the proposed scheme provides an attractive and effective mechanism for enhancing the IEEE 802.11 standard.