  In recent years, WLAN technology has been gaining popularity around the world
with its sub standard 802.11b receiving major deployments in many indoor and
outdoor environments. In this article we investigate the performance of IEEE
802.11b infrastructure networks in the lossless and lossy environments by means
of a simulation study. Also, this study shows how the FIFO discipline of the
802.11b MAC affects on the global performance when at least one channel is
under the influence of the bursty errors. Furthermore, this paper proposes a
channel aware backoff algorithm for the Access Point (AP) to prioritize its
transmissions and to accelerate the transmissions in the poor radio channels to
enhance the performance of the real time applications. The final results of
this simulation study showed that the proposed algorithm is able to enhance the
throughput and the delay in lossy environment by an average of 49% and 83%
respectively.
