Priority-Oriented Adaptive Control With QoS Guarantee for Wireless LANs

In today´s wireless networks, there is a great need for quality of service (QoS), because of the time-bounded voice, audio, and video traffic. A new QoS enhanced standard is being standardized by the IEEE 802.11e workgroup. It uses a contention free access mechanism called hybrid control channel access (HCCA) to guarantee QoS. However, HCCA is not efficient for all types of time-bounded traffic. This paper proposes an alternative protocol which could be adapted in hybrid coordination function (HCF). The priority-oriented adaptive control with QoS guarantee (POAC-QG) is a complete centralized channel access mechanism, it is able to guarantee QoS for all types of multimedia network applications, it enhances the parameterized traffic with priorities, and it supports time division access using slots. Furthermore, it instantly negotiates the quality levels of the traffic streams (TSs) according to their priorities, supporting multiple streams to the best quality it can achieve. POAC-QG, compared to HCCA, provides higher channel utilization, adapts better to the characteristics of the different traffic types, differentiates the TSs more efficiently using priorities, and, generally, exhibits superior performance.