ABSTRACT
Wireless technology has shown tremendous growth and acceptance as a solution for both wireless local area networks and wireless metropolitan area networks. The use of multimedia applications over IP with quality-of-service (QoS) support is now a reality in corporate networks and is rapidly expanding to the wireless networks. In this chapter, the state-of-the-art in supporting the QoS concepts in the IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks and the IEEE 802.16-based wireless metropolitan area networks is presented. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part starts by describing the IEEE 802.11 standard that supports only best effort (BE) services before examining the new IEEE 802.11e that is introduced to support sophisticated services that guarantee QoS attributes such as bandwidth, delay, and jitter. The second part explores the QoS in the wireless metropolitan area networks as introduced in IEEE 802.16 standard and its IEEE 802.16e amendment. Open research issues pertaining to realizing QoS in these networks are identified and some of the solutions that are proposed to address these challenges are also presented.
