Architecture for a Windows NT wireless LAN multimedia terminal

The support for multimedia services in wireless access networks is challenging to implement, due to an unreliable and bandwidth-limited wireless medium. In addition, the widely used applications and protocols generally lack the support for quality-of-service (QoS) parameters. This paper presents the architecture of a multimedia wireless LAN terminal. The terminal is implemented using a custom network demonstrator platform connected to a Windows NT workstation. The system provides a separate management plane for configuring the service parameters of a proprietary wireless medium access control (MAC) protocol. Also, native applications that are capable of accessing the MAC QoS parameters directly are supported.