Investigation of QoS Support of Wireless MAC Protocols

The key task of this thesis is to investigate on how QoS is supported in the existing IEEE 802.11 standards and afterwards design and simulate a TDMA-based (Time Division Multiple Access) MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol with QoS support for IEEE 802.11 networks. An investigation on existing approaches of TDMA-based MAC protocols for wireless networks should be performed and a summary of advantages and disadvantages of existing mechanisms shall be given.

A TDMA-based approach for a MAC protocol requires a scheduling component that decides timeslot assignement based on a bandwidth distribution algorithm. As infrastructure WLANs already have a central point, which is the access point (AP), the most straight forward approach is to utilize the access point control to define on how timeslots are assigned to different devices.