Controlled Channel Access Scheduling for Guaranteed QoS in 802.11e-Based WLANs

The IEEE 802.11e standard developed by IEEE 802.11TGe intends to provide the quality of service (QoS) support in IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs) through the introduction of hybrid coordination function (HCF). The HCF controlled channel access (HCCA) designed as a part of HCF is the medium access mechanism for parameterized QoS and is suitable for multimedia applications requiring hard QoS guarantees. The standard also defines a reference scheduler to complement HCCA in meeting these guarantees. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the reference scheduler described in the standard by using a novel queueing analytic framework. The analysis reveals the performance deficiencies of the reference scheduler. Afterwards, to overcome these deficiencies, we propose a new scheduling scheme, namely, the prediction and optimization-based HCCA (PRO-HCCA), based on the insights gained from the queueing analysis. Simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme overcomes the problems of the reference scheduler and successfully enables the HCCA to fulfill the QoS guarantees for multimedia applications.