Overview

An 802.11 network provides contention-based wireless access. To provide applications with QoS services, IEEE developed 802.11e for 802.11-based WLANs.

While IEEE 802.11e was being standardized, Wi-Fi Alliance defined the Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) standard to allow QoS provision devices of different vendors to interoperate. WMM enables a WLAN to provide QoS services, so that audio and video applications can have better performance in WLANs.