With the rapid growth of multimedia applications and the advances of wireless communication technologies, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services in heterogeneous wireless networks has been an important issue and drawn much attention from both academia and industry. Due to the hostile transmission environment and limited radio resources, QoS provisioning in wireless networks is much more complex and difficult than in its wired counterpart. Moreover, due to the lack of central controller in the networks, distributed network control is required, adding complexity to QoS provisioning. In this thesis, medium access control (MAC) with QoS provisioning is investigated for both single- and multi-hop wireless networks including wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks.

Originally designed for high-rate data traffic, a WLAN has limited capability to support delay-sensitive voice traffic, and the service for voice traffic may be impacted by data traffic load, resulting in delay violation or large delay variance. Aiming at addressing these limitations, we propose an efficient MAC scheme and a call admission control algorithm to provide guaranteed QoS for voice traffic and, at the same time, increase the voice capacity significantly compared with the current WLAN standard. In addition to supporting voice traffic, providing better services for data traffic in WLANs is another focus of our research. In the current WLANs, all the data traffic receives the same best-effort service, and it is difficult to provide further service differentiation for data traffic based on some specific requirements of customers or network service providers. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel token-based scheduling scheme, which provides great flexibility and facility to the network service provider for service class management.

As a WLAN has small coverage and cannot meet the growing demand for wireless service requiring communications “at anywhere and at anytime”, a large scale multi-hop wireless network (e.g., wireless ad hoc networks and wireless mesh networks) becomes a necessity. Due to the location-dependent contentions, a number of problems (e.g., hidden/exposed terminal problem, unfairness, and priority reversal problem) appear in a multi-hop wireless environment, posing more challenges for QoS provisioning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel busy-tone based distributed MAC scheme for wireless ad hoc networks, and a collision-free MAC scheme for wireless mesh networks, respectively, taking the different network characteristics into consideration. The proposed schemes enhance the QoS provisioning capability to real-time traffic and, at the same time, significantly improve the system throughput and fairness performance for data traffic, as compared with the most popular IEEE 802.11 MAC scheme.