A call admission and rate control scheme for multimedia support over IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

In this paper, we proposed a novel call admission and rate control (CARC) scheme. Unlike previous research works that are focused on providing service differentiation in the contention-based 802.11 DCF, we aim to support stringent QoS requirements of real-time and streaming traffic. The key idea of this scheme is to regulate the arriving traffic of the WLAN such that the network can work at an optimal point. We first show that the channel busyness ratio is a good indicator of the network status in the sense that it is easy to obtain and can accurately and timely represent channel utilization. Then we propose two algorithms that function upon the use of the channel busyness ratio. The call admission control algorithm is used to regulate the admission of real-time or streaming traffic and the rate control algorithm to control the transmission rate of best effort traffic. A comprehensive simulation study in ns-2 has verified the performance of our proposed CARC scheme, showing that the original 802.11 DCF protocol can statically support strict QoS requirements, such as those required by voice over IP or streaming video, and at the same time, achieve a high channel utilization.