Dynamic frame aggregation scheduler for multimedia applications in IEEE 802.11n networks

International audienceProviding Quality of Service (QoS) to real time applications over Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is becoming a very challenging task due to the diversity of multimedia applications. Concurrently, there are numerous WLANs devices that are rising recently. Mainly, we focus on IEEE 802.11n since it was designed to support a high data transmission rate (toward 600 Mbps) based on frame aggregation schemes. The aggregation mechanism accumulates many frames before transmitting them into a single larger frame, thus reducing overhead and increasing efficiency and throughput. Yet, this scheme cannot provide QoS satisfaction for delay sensitive application even if it supports higher throughputs. Indeed, aggregation headers cause supplementary delays particularly when aggregating unfrequent packets with small sizes. To overcome this limitation, we propose in this paper a new Dynamic Frame Aggregation (DFA) scheduler to provide QoS satisfaction to real time services. To achieve this goal, we defined new scheduling parameters such as QoS delays to avoid accumulation of non-scheduled packets. Hence, the DFA scheduler serves packets and dynamically adjusts the aggregated frame size based on these QoS delays. Conducted simulations illustrate the performance of our proposed DFA scheduler in term of satisfying QoS, throughput, loss and delay requirements of voice and video traffics