Traffic Aware HCCA Scheduling for the IEEE 802.11e Wireless LAN

Due to the growth of the wireless technology, demands on quality of service (QoS) in wireless networking have increased. Although IEEE 802.11e has been proposed for the support of the QoS, it still has weakness on the adapting varying profiles of multimedia traffic. Especially, Variable Bit Rate (VBR) streams cannot be supported in the current standard in terms of delay. In this paper, we first investigate problems of the current standard, and then propose a new scheduling algorithm, explicit traffic aware (ETA) scheduler. The novelty of proposed scheme is the accurate adaptation of scheduling with the queue length information contained on explicit queue length notification (EQN) frame from mobile stations. We simulate the performance of ETA scheduler and compare the results with the reference scheduler in the current standard, CBR scheduler.