Dynamic Resource Reservation and QoS Management in IEEE 802.11e Networks

Quality of service (QoS) guarantees are becoming increasingly relevant for mobile networks, too, as they have to support, e.g., more and more audio and video applications with real-time requirements. Therefore, recent extensions of WLANs, namely IEEE 802.11e, are introducing new mechanisms to enable the provisioning of QoS guarantees, in particular by means of resource reservation. This paper suggests to diminish the inefficiencies of the resource reservation approach as taken by IEEE 802.11e. The solution advocated is to embed the authors’ earlier abstract approach for a dynamic resource redistribution into 802.11e based WLANs. By means of analytical and simulation models it is demonstrated that the extension of 802.11e based networks by a dynamic resource redistribution can lead to a significant increase in overall network utilization, though QoS requirements can still be guaranteed.