The standards board of the full IEEE approved the quality of service specifications for WLANs. The specification aims to prioritize traffic and prevent packet collisions and delays. This should improve VoIP and IPTV delivered over wireless LANs. WLANs based on 802.11 allow users to share bandwidth and no packet gets priority over any other. Typical email and browsing applications are not generally effected by this delivery method, but voice data and video requires that its packets arrive at the right time. The new standard aims to fix that by allowing the client to designate four traffic classes for a packet, each with its own queue: voice, video, best-effort and background.
Insiders see the IEEE's solution as a good start for WiFi QoS but not the end of the story. Allowing the client to designate a packet's importance would allow anyone to mark an email as highly important. Large scale enterprise deployments require a more centralized and sophisticated traffic cop. Residences with multiple WiFi VoIP phones and IPTV sets will also need a better system than one queue for voice and one for video to maintain high quality during each of those sessions.
For more on the IEEE's approval of 802.11:
- turn your attention to this piece from Techworld