The usable throughput of an IEEE 802.11 system for an application is much less than the raw bandwidth. Although 802.11b has a theoretical maximum of 11 Mbps, more than half of the bandwidth is consumed by overhead leaving at most 5 Mbps of usable bandwidth. Considering this characteristic, this paper proposes and analyzes a real-time distributed scheduling scheme based on the existing IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks, using USC/ISI's Power Aware Sensing Tracking and Analysis (PASTA)

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... platform. We compared the distributed realtime scheduling scheme with the real-time polling scheme to meet deadline, and compared a measured real bandwidth with a theoretical result. The theoretical and experimental results show that the distributed scheduling scheme can guarantee real-time traffic and enhances the performance up to 74% compared with polling scheme.