Optimizing IEEE 802.11 wireless network for long distance transmission

Abstract

Wireless networks are increasingly popular in recent years. IEEE 802.11 is an international standard that specifies wireless medium access control protocol. Wireless multimedia extension (WME) is the recent extension to the standard (IEEE 802.1 le) that addresses transporting time sensitive data such as video and voice by accommodating quality of service (QOS) techniques like priority queuing and priority tagging. But having QOS only is not sufficient when WLAN is deployed in outdoor environments for such application as video surveillance. In this thesis, we propose an algorithm that tweaks the medium access control (MAC) parameters to have an enhanced WLAN performance over a long distance when deployed in outdoor. Experimental results show that this approach achieves significant performance improvement.