Selective Frame Transmission for QoS provisioning in IEEE 802.11 networks

We propose a generic algorithm called SFT (Selective Frame Transmission), which is applicable to both pre-encoded and live AV (Audio Video) content streaming, and endeavors to ensure timely delivery of frames to the receiver by selectively dropping certain frames at the transmitter which do not satisfy the end-to-end latency bound. The key idea of SFT is that the end-to-end latency bound includes two consequential contributors namely, (i) fixed time overhead which represents the time involved in capturing of the information and its subsequent encoding, decoding, and display and (ii) variable time overhead which signifies the time involved in the (re)transmission and reception of a frame over the wireless medium. A variable time overhead tolerance bound aware MAC (Medium Access Control) layer at the transmitter determines the fate of the (re)transmitted frames based on the associated time-stamp and the priority. The effectiveness of our algorithm is verified through simulations for an indoor environment with various offered load, transmission rate, and available bandwidth settings.