In the last few years WLANs have become more and more popular, enabling
access to the Internet and to private or company-internal networks all over
the place. With the increasing amount of users sharing one and the same
medium, running demanding applications with the need of exchanging larger
and larger quantities of data, the necessity has grown to provide information
interchange with satisfactory quality of service (QoS). The latter property
requires among other things a MAC protocol enabling an efficient and fair
medium access for competing network participants. In this book, different
MAC schemes are investigated under the aspect of QoS, examining their efficiency
and displaying their strengths and weaknesses. Those key elements
which influence the QoS are tried to be analyzed and based on these results
some propositions are presented which could be implemented in a new
protocol to provide a satisfying QoS. The intention of this book is to help the
reader get familiarized with existing MAC protocols, allow deeper understanding
of the general functionality of medium access mechanisms and enable
certain acquirement of sensitivity in the context of recognizing MAC scheme
immanent problems. The book is aimed at computer scientists, students and
interested readers who want to understand in more detail one of the main
elements of QoS to efficiently support wireless data communication.