Medium Access and Flow Management in IEEE 802.11 and 802.11e WLANS

With the increasing demand of multimedia services over internet and local area networks, techniques to provide better data rate, low latency and low packet loss have also emerged. For this reason, IEEE has introduced a standard for local area networks known as IEEE 802.11e. In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of basic and new standard in terms of medium access technique and management of multiple flows. NS2 is used as a simulation tool and different traffic types like CBR, VBR and FTP are used to completely analyze the performance differences between two standards. The enhanced standard is found better in protecting and providing less delay in medium access to high priority flows.