Enhanced Per-Flow Admission Control and QoS Provisioning in IEEE 802.11e Wireless LANs

Abstract

The emerging IEEE 802.11e standard is expected to provide service differentiation and resource allocation for real-time traffic. To support the transmission of voice and multimedia data with performance guarantees, it is crucial to design efficient algorithms for admission control and resource allocation (particularly under heavy load), and several methods have been proposed to date. However, most of these proposed methods may not be efficient, because they assign channel access parameters (CAPs) according to the access category into which a flow is mapped rather than the absolute quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the flow. Using simulations, we highlight the shortcomings of current admission control methods, and accordingly, we propose a flow-based service differentiation mechanism. We introduce the proper ldquoper-flowrdquo selection of CAPs based on the QoS requirements of traffic flows. Furthermore, the new flow-based admission can control and adjust CAPs with the channel condition variations. We validate our reasoning through extensive simulations and a thorough comparison with other schemes.