Cross Layer Designs in WLAN Systems

This book aims to serve as a comprehensive technical guide and reference material for practitioners, engineers, scientists and researchers providing them with the state-of-the-art of research work and recent achievements in different aspects of cross-layer for WLAN systems. Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) have turned into a very attractive solution to offer network connectivity, providing user mobility, flexibility and easy deployment at a relatively low cost. The popularity and the traffic load of WLANs grows as well as the necessity to support real-time delay-sensitive applications such as voice, video streaming or online-gaming. Therefore, the need for higher efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees becomes necessary. It has been proved that the consideration of the physical layer transmission characteristics from the higher layers can significantly improve the efficiency of the WLAN systems. In general, the exchange of information between different layers of the OSI model is known as Cross-Layer design and is a very promising field of investigation and deployment.