Analysis of Different Scheduling Strategies in 802.11e Networks with Multi-Class Traffic

This paper tackles the problem of traffic and packet scheduling in HCCA, the contention-free portion of the 802.11e MAC protocol. Scheduling traffic belonging to different categories or priorities on a shared channel, as in wireless LANs, is a multi-class complex optimization problem. We consider two different scheduling techniques, one based on an extremely simple positional controller and one based on the optimal solution of the linearized control problem based on a fluid approximation. Simulation results are presented discussing pros and cons of the two solutions both in terms of performances (resource exploitation and traffic differentiation properties) and in terms of implementation complexity and fairness.