Performance analysis of controlled access phase scheduling for per-session QoS provisioning in IEEE 802.11e WLANs

The widespread deployment of IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks (WLAN) has made broadband access a reality for many consumers. As a result, supporting a wide range of applications, in particular networked multimedia applications, has become of increasing importance. Since specific delay and bandwidth requirements of multimedia applications cannot be fulfilled by the current IEEE 802.11-based WLANs, new enhancements are being introduced to the medium access control (MAC) layer of the 802.11 standard under the framework of the IEEE 802.11e. Nevertheless, the 802.11e only provides the means of supporting quality of service (QoS) in the MAC layer and does not mandate a final solution for QoS issues. We present a QoS solution that employs the controlled access features of the 802.11e to provide per-session guaranteed QoS. Our design comprises of a scheduler that assigns guaranteed service times to individual sessions using a fair scheduling algorithm. Through analysis and experiments we prove the fairness of the algorithm and show that the proposed solution outperforms other methods that are contention or priority based