Designing low power ad-hoc 802.11 wireless networks for voice and video applications

IEEE 802.11 protocol has found wide acceptability in the past few years, especially in embedded devices. Some of the embedded devices supporting 802.11 interfaces are voice and video-based devices like cordless phones, music players, camcorders, etc. These devices work in ad-hoc mode of operation for a number of applications. Such applications have some mandatory requirements that require one to determine and configure appropriate 802.11 protocol system parameters in the devices. We present mechanisms to evaluate requirements of voice and video applications to determine the appropriate 802.11 system parameters to be configured for them. Our approach takes into consideration a wide set of factors that impact different applications/devices - conserving power in battery-powered devices, reducing the memory usage in limited memory embedded devices and meeting the stringent jitter and delay constraints imposed by interactive multimedia applications. Our approach is quite comprehensive as it considers a combination of all the factors that impact an application to determine the correct system parameters for the application.