ABSTRACT
IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (LANs) have been widely deployed around the globe due to their low cost, robustness, and ease of deployment. The WLANs are set up in “hot spots” to provide high-data-rate network access for nomadic users. The original 802.11a/b/g standards [23-26] defined a physical layer (PHY) supporting data rates up to 54 Mb/s, and the corresponding medium access control (MAC) layer functionalities. With the increasing demand from real-time multimedia applications on WLANs, the 802.11e standard [27] was approved in 2005 to provide quality-of-service (QoS) support by differentiating different classes of traffic. The 802.11n working group [1] is in the process of finalizing a new PHY/MAC extension to increase the physical layer bit rate up to 600 Mbps. In order to extend the limited coverage area of WLAN,
14.1 Introduction .......................................................... 419 14.2 Background ............................................................420
