The main topic of this research is media-access control protocols for multimedia traffic. The main objective was to produce a wireless local area network media-access control protocol that would satisfy the requirements for real-time applications. A survey was conducted to ' have an overview of the types of media-access control protocols that are available. The area of limited-contention protocols was selected for further study and analysis and a wireless local area network limited-contention-based protocol known as the distributed load sensing protocol with priority mechanism, was developed for the purpose of providing a suitable protocol algorithm for multimedia traffic. The major advantages of such a protocol were demonstrated through mathematical analysis, simulation and comparative study.