Experimental Triple-Play Service Delivery Using Commodity Wireless LAN Hardware

In this paper we study the feasibility of utilizing wireless local area network (WLAN) technology to deliver the triple-play services (video, voice and data) over a specific system model. Existing protocols are shown to not efficiently manage the wireless channel therefore we propose a new triple-play time division multiple access (TP-TDMA) media access control (MAC) protocol to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for these Triple-Play services in a point-to-multipoint network over an existing 802.11a physical layer. Through extensive simulation analysis, the protocol is shown to offer better performance than the 802.11e enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCF). Moreover, this protocol is implemented in hardware using the MADWiFi driver to verify the real-world performance. Both results of the simulation study and hardware implementation are provided.