Wireless LANs, Real-Time Traffic

Abstract: The usage of Wireless Local Area Networks is increasing rapidly throughout the world. The technology today is not quality proof for the market’s demands. We want to be able to completely wireless perform our demands, such as confer via video or IP-telephony. This is what we call multimedia real-time traffic. It may be achieved over the physical infrastructure in some areas with good results. The goal of this Master’s Thesis is to analyze the possibilities and give solutions and suggestions to achieve multimedia over the wireless networks, with emphasis on the protocol Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). This Master’s Thesis is a theoretical study and the suggested solutions have not been tested in an actual wireless network. Instead they have been tested by computer simulation to give an indication of improvements. Basic configurations are set to the same as in the IEEE 802.11 standard. Different methods to reach possible improvements of a WLAN are studied, analyzed and simulated. Such methods are: priority, congestion management and multi-channel protocol. Simulations results show how the priority affects the wireless network and how a multi-channel protocol improves the latency and efficiency of the network. The simulation part is concentrated to show improvements of real-time traffic, which is time sensitive. With a multi- channel protocol the network can allow more users, i.e. more traffic. Also, the network will gain improvement in stability.