Abstract

802.11 wireless networks are a convenient way to provide ‘last-hop’ network connections in many environments. However the distributed nature of their operation poses problems in providing quality of service guarantees, which are vital for providing interactive services such as Voice over IP. In this thesis we will review the operation of 802.11 and it’s extended MAC layer, 802.11e. We will then review some analytical models used to explore the behaviour of the 802.11 MAC and test some of the assumptions underlying these models. We confirm that our testbed operates according to the standards before using it to explore the behaviour of VoIP traffic, using it as a test case to examine the provision of quality of service guarantees via the extended 802.11e MAC. This work is based on several papers [9] [19] [10].