USER CLASS BASED QoS DIFFERENTIATION IN 802.11e WLAN

摘要

802.11e is the new extension to the family of 802.11 standards which tries to provide QoS support to data services over the wireless LAN. However, it does not provide any mechanism to differentiate users which becomes a bottleneck for providing differentiated services to users from all sections of the society. In this paper, we study the 802.11e MAC protocol and suggest some enhancements to the current standard that will be able to provide QoS depending on the class a user belongs to in addition to the traffic category used by the user/station. Our algorithm takes into consideration the class of a user and the traffic category before any resource assignment is made. The algorithm has the scope for various tradeoffs that can be provided depending on the importance of the objective function: bandwidth utilization or prioritization of station's ability to transmit. Simulations were conducted to validate our algorithms and test their efficiency.