An M-time inheriting transmission strategy for interactive multimedia applications in wireless networks

With the development of IEEE 802.11 WLAN techniques, the wireless network bandwidth has gradually become sufficient for many multimedia applications. However, the standard MAC protocol is originally designed for traditional data transmission fashions, which are asymmetric transmissions, and seems to be not an efficient transmission fashion for recently oncoming multimedia applications. A sort of interactive multimedia applications, such as video conference, interactive Internet game, and network phone (VoIP), etc., is more and more popular in the world. The features of these interactive applications are frequent and bi-directional data exchange, which will cause large and unnecessary transmission overheads for channel contention under the standard MAC protocol. To reduce these overheads and improve system transmission efficiency, an M-time inheriting transmission strategy (MITS) is proposed in this paper. The MITS is a dynamically bi-directional transmission strategy, which uses the token-like fashion to allow the receiver to send its data frame immediately without participating in following channel contention. Simulation results show that the MITS can indeed improve system goodput of the standard MAC protocol in the environments with interactive applications.