  The proliferation of IEEE 802.11-based wireless LANs opens up avenues for
creation of several tetherless and mobility oriented services. Most of these
services, like voice over WLAN, media streaming etc., generate delay and
bandwidth sensitive traffic. These traffic flows require undisrupted network
connectivity with some QoS guarantees. Unfortunately, there is no adequate
support built into these wireless LANs towards QoS provisioning. Further, the
network layer handoff latency incurred by mobile nodes in these wireless LANs
is too high for real-time applications to function properly. In this paper, we
describe a QoS mechanism, called Rether, to effectively support bandwidth
guarantee on wireless LANs. Rether is designed to support the current wireless
LAN technologies like 802.11b and 802.11a with a specific capability of being
tailored for QoS oriented technology like 802.11e. We also describe a
low-latency handoff mechanism which expedites network level handoff to provide
real-time applications with an added advantage of seamless mobility.
