IEEE 802.15.4 is a new standard, uniquely designed for low rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs). It targets ultra-low complexity, cost, and power, for low-data-rate wireless connectivity. However, one of the main problems of this new standard is its insufficient, and inefficient, media access control (MAC) for priority data. This paper introduces an extended contention access period (XCAP) concept for priority packets, also an traffic adaptive contention differentiation utilizing the XCAP (TACDX). The TACDX determines appropriate transmission policy alternatively according to the traffic conditions and type of packet. TACDX achieves not only enhanced transmission for priority packets but it also has a high energy efficiency for the overall network. The proposed TACDX is verified with simulations to measure the performances.

Channel scanning is an important aspect of seamless handovers since it is required in order to find a target point of attachment (PoA). However, channel scanning in single radio devices may cause severe service disruptions with the current PoA so that the provided QoS will be further degraded during a handover. In this letter, we propose a dynamic channel scanning algorithm that supports QoS. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism reduces the service disruptions and provides the desired QoS to users during the scanning period.

A new distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol--Soft Reservation Multiple Access with Priority Assignment (SRMA/PA) protocol--is introduced for supporting the integrated services of real-time and non-real-time applications in mobile ad-hoc networks. The SRMA/PA protocol allows the distributed nodes to contend for and reserve time slots with RTS/CTS-like "collision-avoidance" handshake and "soft reservation" mechanism augmented with distributed and dynamic access priority control. The SRMA/PA protocol realizes distributed scheduling for guaranteeing QoS requirements of integrated services and maximizes statistical multiplexing gain. We have demonstrated by simulation studies that the multiplexing gain can be improved significantly without unduly compromising on system complexity. Moreover, we have shown that the proposed back-off mechanism designed for delay-constrained services is useful for further improving utilization of the channel.