A Measurement-Based Admission Control Mechanism for Wireless Local Area Networks

As users become more comfortable using IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks, the need for quality of service is becoming more important because of the lack of support in current standards and the increase of multimedia traffic over the Internet. The IEEE 802.11 working group has recognized this fact proposing the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), a priority-based distributed scheme meant to provide service differentiation. EDCA relies on either different Arbitrary Interframe Space (AIFS), or Contention Window (CW) parameters, or both to provide service differentiation. In this thesis, a performance evaluation of the EDCA using five different combinations of the above mentioned parameters is included and compared to the current DCF (Distributed Coordination Function) standard, which is used as the base case. Simulation results show that simpler schemes based on one parameter alone can provide good average service differentiation. However, only multiparameter schemes provide the average and instantaneous high throughput and low delay values needed to support streaming applications. Starvation is a problem spanning all these schemes. It is especially more pronounced in schemes using combinations of parameters. In this thesis, a measurement-based admission control mechanism is proposed to overcome the above stated problems. The admission control mechanism uses an algorithm that admits a flow depending on the jitter values for high priority traffic and the throughput of the low priority traffic. It also allows the administrator to set the bandwidth sharing policy between the high priority traffic and low priority traffic. Results show that the admission control mechanism not only protects existing high priority flows from jitter and low priority flows from starvation, but also improves upon the network utilization