(07 TMC) Bandwidth sharing schemes for multimedia traffic in the IEEE 802.11e contention-based WLANs.pdf

Bandwidth Sharing Schemes for Multimedia Traffic in the IEEE 802.11e Contention-Based WLANs Yang Xiao, Senior Member, IEEE, Frank Haizhon Li, Student Member, IEEE, and Bo Li, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—Bandwidth allocation schemes have been well studied for mobile cellular networks. However, there is no study about this aspect reported for IEEE 802.11 contention-based distributed wireless LANs. In cellular networks, bandwidth is deterministic in terms of the number of channels by frequency division, time division, or code division. On the contrary, bandwidth allocation in contention- based distributed wireless LANs is extremely challenging due to its contention-based nature, packet-based network, and the most important aspect: only one channel is available, competed for by an unknown number of stations. As a consequence, guaranteeing bandwidth and allocating bandwidth are both challenging issues. In this paper, we address these difficult issues. We propose and study nine bandwidth allocation schemes, called sharing schemes, with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) for integrated voice/video/data traffic in IEEE 802.11e contention-based distributed wireless LANs. A guard period is proposed to prevent bandwidth allocation from overprovisioning and is for best-effort data traffic. Our study and analysis show that the guard period is a key concept for QoS guarantees in a contention-based channel. The proposed schemes are compared and evaluated via extensive simulations. Index Terms—Admission control, IEEE 802.11e, quality of service, resource management, wireless LANs. ? 1 INTRODUCTION IN recent years, the market for IEEE 802.11 wireless localarea networks (WLANs) has enjoyed tremendous growth, partially due to potential applications of WLANs such as convenient Internet/database access and high speed com- munications with reasonable costs. We have also witnessed phenomenal growth in cellular data services and emerging wireless multimedia applications. Bandwidth alloca