A Prioritized Medium Access Control (P-MAC) protocol is proposed for wireless routers of mesh networks with quality-of-service provisioning. The simple yet effective design of P-MAC offers strict service differentiation for prioritized packets. A Markov model is developed to yield important performance matrices including the packet blocking probability due to queue overflow and the packet reneging probability due to delay bound. It is further proved that the service time of P-MAC approximates exponential distribution, and can be effectively estimated. The analytic models with preemptive and non-preemptive schemes, validated via simulations, show that P-MAC can effectively support traffic differentiation and achieve very low packet dropping (both reneging and blocking) probabilities when the traffic load is below the channel capacity. When the network is overloaded, P-MAC can still maintain extremely stable and high channel throughput. Moreover, it is demonstrated that P-MAC performs superior in multihop networks, further proving the advantages of the proposed protocol. A Prioritized Medium Access Control (P-MAC) protocol is proposed for wireless routers of mesh networks with quality-of-service provisioning. The simple yet effective design of P-MAC offers strict service differentiation for prioritized packets. A Markov model is developed to yield important performance matrices including the packet blocking probability due to queue overflow and the packet reneging probability due to delay bound. It is further verified that the service time of P-MAC approximates exponential distribution, and can be effectively estimated. The analytic models with preemptive and non-preemptive schemes, validated via simulations, show that P-MAC can effectively support traffic differentiation and achieve very low packet dropping (both reneging and blocking) probabilities when the traffic load is below the channel capacity. When the network is overloaded, P -MAC can still maintain extremely stable and high channel throughput. Moreover, it is a demonstration that P-MAC performs su perior in multihop networks, further proving the advantages of the proposed protocol.