Adaptive polling MAC schemes for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs supporting voice-over-IP (VoIP) services

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 standard specifies the point coordination function (PCF) in the media access control (MAC) sublayer for the transfer of real-time traffic, such as voice. The transfer of real-time traffic over wireless LANs is rapidly gaining acceptance, but little work has been done concerning the efficient use of IEEE 802.11 PCF mode to support voice-over-IP (VoIP) services. In this paper, we propose adaptive polling MAC schemes for IEEE 802.11 MAC. The proposed schemes achieve bandwidth efficiency by reducing the number of polls required for the uplink voice packet transmissions using a talkspurt detection algorithm. We analyze the applicability of the proposed schemes to IEEE 802.11 WLANs and compare them with other related works. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.