Transmission of Multimedia Data over Next Generation Wireless Networks

To overcome the low effective throughput of the popular IEEE 802.11 WLANs, a high performance WLAN standard is being developed. This new standard not only increases the raw PHY data rate but also increases the effective throughput with different MAC layer enhancements, such as frame aggregation. For small size multimedia data packet frame aggregation can improve the quality of service (QoS) of the applications. However, the wireless channel is often time varying and location dependent. Therefore aggregation of frames increases the probability of error, since the size of the frame is increased. With erroneous wireless channel an optimum value of aggregation size can greatly improve the performance of the multimedia applications. In this paper we propose a mechanism to dynamically select the aggregation size based on the channel condition prediction which reduces the number frames dropped due to wireless error. Also within a certain delay bound a link level retransmission mechanism can be used to improve the quality of the multimedia applications.