Admission control in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

Although IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks have become more and more popular due to low cost and easy deployment, they can only provide best effort services and do not have quality of service supports for multimedia applications. Recently, a new standard, IEEE 802.11e, has been proposed, which introduces a so-called hybrid coordination function containing two medium access mechanisms: contention-based channel access and controlled channel access. In this article we first give a brief tutorial on the various MAC-layer QoS mechanisms provided by 802.11e. We show that the 802.11e standard provides a very powerful platform for QoS supports in WLANs. Then we provide an extensive survey of recent advances in admission control algorithms/protocols in IEEE 802.11e WLANs. Our survey covers the research work in admission control for both EDCA and HCCA. We show that the new MAC-layer QoS schemes and parameters provided in EDCA and HCCA can be well utilized to fulfill the requirements of admission control so that QoS for multimedia applications can be provided in WLANs. Last, we give a summary of the design of admission control in EDCA and HCCA, and point out the remaining challenges.     

Distributed mechanisms for quality of service in wireless LANs

Wireless local area networks are gaining popularity at an unprecedented rate, at home, at work, and in public hot spot locations. As these networks become ubiquitous and an integral part of the infrastructure, they will increasingly be used for multimedia applications. There is limited QoS support in WLANs, which will become an impediment in deploying multimedia applications. We present a tutorial on QoS support in IEEE 802.11 WLANs with a focus on the distributed MAC protocol of 802.11. Most QoS support mechanisms proposed for 802.11 use well-known techniques such as priority assignment and fair scheduling, and map QoS metrics into some existing 802.11 MAC parameter, thereby avoiding a redesign of the MAC protocol. We provide a taxonomy of the mechanisms and describe the essential concepts, problems, and advantages of each mechanism. From our study, we conclude that choosing the right set of MAC parameters and the QoS mechanism itself to provide predictable QoS in 802.11 networks is still an open problem.     

Efficient Radio Resource Management in Integrated WLAN/CDMA Mobile Networks

The complementary characteristics of wireless local area networks (WLANs) and wideband code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular networks make it attractive to integrate these two technologies. How to utilize the overall radio resources optimally in this heterogeneous integrated environment is a challenging issue. This paper proposes an optimal joint session admission control scheme for multimedia traffic that maximizes overall network revenue with quality of service (QoS) constraints over both WLANs and CDMA cellular networks. WLANs operate under IEEE 802.11e medium access control (MAC) protocol, which supports QoS for multimedia traffic. A cross-layer optimization approach is used in CDMA networks taking into account both physical layer linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) receivers and network layer QoS requirements. Numerical examples illustrate that the network revenue earned in the proposed joint admission control scheme is significantly more than that when the individual networks are optimized independently.     

An enhancement to the IEEE 802.11e EDCA providing QoS guarantees

One of the challenges that must be overcome to realize the practical benefits of ad hoc networks is quality of service (QoS). However, the IEEE 802.11 standard, which undeniably is the most widespread wireless technology of choice for WLANs and ad hoc networks, does not address this issue. In order to support applications with QoS requirements, the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard enhances the original IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol by introducing a new coordination function which has both contention-based and contention-free medium access methods. In this paper, we consider the contention-based medium access method, the EDCA, and propose an extension to it such that it can be used to provide QoS guarantees in WLANs operating in ad hoc mode. Our solution is fully distributed, uses admission control to regulate the usage of resources and gives stations with high-priority traffic streams an opportunity to reserve time for collision-free access to the medium.     

Quality-of-service provisioning system for multimedia transmission in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11, the standard of wireless local area networks (WLANs), allows the coexistence of asynchronous and time-bounded traffic using the distributed coordination function (DCF) and point coordination function (PCF) modes of operations, respectively. In spite of its increasing popularity in real-world applications, the protocol suffers from the lack of any priority and access control policy to cope with various types of multimedia traffic, as well as user mobility. To expand support for applications with quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, the 802.11E task group was formed to enhance the original IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol. However, the problem of choosing the right set of MAC parameters and QoS mechanism to provide predictable QoS in IEEE 802.11 networks remains unsolved. In this paper, we propose a polling with nonpreemptive priority-based access control scheme for the IEEE 802.11 protocol. Under such a scheme, modifying the DCF access method in the contention period supports multiple levels of priorities such that user handoff calls can be supported in wireless LANs. The proposed transmit-permission policy and adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme derive sufficient conditions such that all the time-bounded traffic sources satisfy their time constraints to provide various QoS guarantees in the contention free period, while maintaining efficient bandwidth utilization at the same time. In addition, our proposed scheme is provably optimal for voice traffic in that it gives minimum average waiting time for voice packets. In addition to theoretical analysis, simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. As it turns out, our design indeed provides a good performance in the IEEE 802.11 WLAN's environment, and can be easily incorporated into the hybrid coordination function (HCF) access scheme in the IEEE 802.11e standard.     

WLAN中基于效用的呼叫接纳控制策略

 为了在802.11的网络中提供服务质量(QoS)支持,IEEE 802.11 Task Group E提出了EDCF协议.然而EDCF只能提供业务区分服务,并不能提供服务质量(QoS)保证.为了能在重负载下提供QoS保证,在WLAN中加入呼叫接纳控制(CAC)机制是非常必要的.本文首先提出了一个新的3维Markov模型对非饱和状态下EDCF的吞吐量和平均接入时延进行了分析.并在此基础上,提出了一种基于效用函数的CAC策略,它可以使网络的总收益达到最大.最后通过大量仿真验证了所提出的CAC策略的有效性.     

The Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11e for QoS Support in Wireless LANs

During the past few years the widespread use of the wireless local area networks (WLANs) communication technique is one of the most popular technologies in data telecommunications and networking. With the increasing variety of multimedia applications, it is needed to develop a mechanism for the quality of service (QoS) to support different types of traffic. The IEEE 802.11 protocol has achieved worldwide acceptance with WLANs with minimum management and maintenance costs. However, IEEE 802.11 can only provide a best effort service and does not support the QoS. In this paper, we pay attention to the enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCF) of WLANs. First, we modify the Ziouva and Antonakopoulous’s (ZA’s) model and then extend the model to support EDCF. We study the behavior of the station within a Markov chain model, and present a more accurate analysis of the EDCF and also study the saturation throughput when the maximum load that the system can support is reached. The numerical results show that the modified model has a better performance than the ZA’s model under an ideal channel scenario.     

Robust SuperPoll with Chaining Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs in Support of Multimedia Applications

Design of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) needs to take into consideration the limited bandwidth available in the ISM band along with the noisy characteristics of the wireless environment and hidden terminal effects. In this paper we propose an enhancement for IEEE 802.11 standard that improves the WLAN support for multimedia applications. In the IEEE 802.11 PCF polling based protocol designed for multimedia applications support, the Point Coordinator (PC) polls each station in the Basic Service Area (BSA) individually. In the proposed SuperPoll approach the PC broadcasts at the beginning of the contention free period a SuperPoll, i.e., a message that includes the list of stations that will be polled during the current period. To improve the reliability of the polling based approach in a noisy environment, we propose to use a chaining mechanism in which each packet resends in its turn the SuperPoll message appended to its packet. We provide performance measurements of the proposed method in terms of channel efficiency and channel access time for multimedia applications that use the contention free period of IEEE 802.11 PCF. We notice that for noisy channels, the proposed method provides a dramatic throughput increase and delay decrease when compared with the Single Poll mechanism used in IEEE 802.11 PCF, thus providing better support for multimedia applications.     

Enabling End-to-End QoS over Hybrid Wired-Wireless Networks

Providing end-to-end parameterized QoS is desirable for many network applications and has received a lot of attention in recent years. However, it remains a challenge, especially over hybrid networks involving both wired networks and wireless access segments (such as IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)). The difficulty in achieving such QoS arises mainly because wireless segments often constitute “gaps" in terms of resource guarantee, due to the lack of efficient resource scheduling and management ability over shared wireless media, as well as the lack of an appropriate QoS signaling interface to seamlessly embed these wireless segments into an end-to-end QoS signaling system. In this paper, we consider the scenario where an IEEE 802.11 wireless node wishes to make an end-to-end resource reservation to a remote wired Internet node and vice versa. We propose Wireless Subnet Bandwidth Manager (Wireless SBM), an extension of SBM protocol to WLANs, to provide seamless end-to-end resource reservations. Wireless SBM utilizes the enhanced resource management ability provided by Hybrid Coordination Function (introduced in the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard) to provide parameterized resource reservation and admission control.     

Provisioning QoS controlled media access in vehicular to infrastructure communications

The emerging IEEE 802.11p standard adopts the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) mechanism as its Media Access Control (MAC) scheme to support quality-of-service (QoS) in the rapidly changing vehicular environment. While the IEEE 802.11 protocol family represents the dominant solutions for wireless local area networks, its QoS performance in terms of throughput and delay, in the highly mobile vehicular networks, is still unclear. To explore an in-depth understanding on this issue, in this paper, we develop a comprehensive analytical model that takes into account both the QoS features of EDCA and the vehicle mobility (velocity and moving directions). Based on the model, we analyze the throughput performance and mean transmission delay of differentiated service traffic, and seek solutions to optimally adjust the parameters of EDCA towards the controllable QoS provision to vehicles. Analytical and simulation results are given to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed model for varying EDCA parameters and vehicle velocity and density.     

Improving protocol capacity for UDP/TCP traffic with model-based frame scheduling in IEEE 802.11-operated WLANs

In this paper, we develop a model-based frame scheduling scheme, called MFS, to enhance the capacity of IEEE 802.11-operated wireless local area networks (WLANs) for both transmission control protocol (TCP) and user datagram protocol (UDP) traffic. In MFS each node estimates the current network status by keeping track of the number of collisions it encounters between its two consecutive successful frame transmissions, and computes accordingly the current network utilization. The result is then used to determine a scheduling delay to be introduced before a node attempts to transmit its pending frame. MFS does not require any change in IEEE 802.11, but instead lays a thin layer between the LL and medium access control (MAC) layers. In order to accurately calculate the current utilization in WLANs, we develop an analytical model that characterizes data transmission activities in IEEE 802.11-operated WLANs with/without the request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) mechanism, and validate the model with ns-2 simulation. All the control overhead incurred in the physical and MAC layers, as well as system parameters specified in IEEE 802.11, are figured in. We conduct a comprehensive simulation study to evaluate MFS in perspective of the number of collisions, achievable throughput, intertransmission delay, and fairness in the cases of TCP and UDP traffic. The simulation results indicate that the performance improvement with respect to the protocol capacity in a WLAN of up to 300 nodes is 1) as high as 20% with the RTS/CTS and 70% without the RTS/CTS in the case of UDP traffic and 2) as high as 10% with the RTS/CTS and 40% without the RTS/CTS in the case of TCP traffic. Moreover, the intertransmission delay in MFS is smaller and exhibits less variation than that in IEEE 802.11; the fairness among wireless nodes in MFS is better than, or equal to, that in IEEE 802.11.     

A traffic control system for IEEE 802.11 networks based on available bandwidth estimation

To support Quality of service (QoS)‐sensitive applications like real‐time video streaming in IEEE 802.11 networks, a MAC layer extension for QoS, IEEE 802.11e, has been recently ratified as a standard. This MAC layer solution, however, addresses only the issue of prioritized access to the wireless medium and leaves such issues as QoS guarantee and admission control to the traffic control systems at the higher layers. This paper presents an IP‐layer traffic control system for IEEE 802.11 networks based on available bandwidth estimation. We build an analytical model for estimating the available bandwidth by extending an existing throughput computation model, and implement a traffic control system that provides QoS guarantees and admission control by utilizing the estimated available bandwidth information. We have conducted extensive performance evaluation of the proposed scheme via both simulations and measurements in the real test‐bed. The experiment results show that our estimation model and traffic control system work accurately and effectively in various network load conditions without IEEE 802.11e. The presence of IEEE 802.11e will allow even more efficient QoS provision, as the proposed scheme and the MAC layer QoS support will complement each other. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Busy tone contention protocol: a new high‐throughput and energy‐efficient wireless local area network medium access control protocol using busy tone

Design of an efficient wireless medium access control (MAC) protocol is a challenging task due to the time‐varying characteristics of wireless communication channel and different delay requirements in diverse applications. To support variable number of active stations and varying network load conditions, random access MAC protocols are employed. Existing wireless local area network (WLAN) protocol (IEEE 802.11) is found to be inefficient at high data rates because of the overhead associated with the contention resolution mechanism employed. The new amendments of IEEE 802.11 that support multimedia traffic (IEEE 802.11e) are at the expense of reduced data traffic network efficiency. In this paper, we propose a random access MAC protocol called busy tone contention protocol (BTCP) that uses out‐of‐band signals for contention resolution in WLANs. A few variants of this protocol are also proposed to meet the challenges in WLAN environments and application requirements. The proposed BTCP isolate multimedia traffics from background data transmissions and gives high throughput irrespective of the number of contending stations in the network. As a result, in BTCP, admission control of multimedia flows becomes simple and well defined. Studies of the protocol, both analytically and through simulations under various network conditions, have shown to give better performance in comparison with the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A novel QoS‐aware MAC protocol for voice services over IEEE 802.11‐based WLANs

With the pervasive growth in the popularity of IEEE 802.11‐based wireless local area networks (WLANs) worldwide, the demand to support delay‐sensitive services such as voice has increased very rapidly. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the medium access control (MAC) architectures and quality of service (QoS) provisioning issues for WLANs. The major challenges in providing QoS to voice services through WLAN MAC protocols are outlined and the solution approaches proposed in the literature are reviewed. To this end, a novel QoS‐aware wireless MAC protocol, called hybrid contention‐free access (H‐CFA) protocol and a call admission control technique, called traffic stream admission control (TS‐AC) algorithm, are presented. The H‐CFA protocol is based on a novel idea that combines two contention‐free wireless medium access approaches, that is, round‐robin polling and time‐division multiple access (TDMA)‐like time slot assignment, and it increases the capacity of WLANs through efficient silence suppression. The TS‐AC algorithm ensures efficient admission control for consistent delay‐bound guarantees and further maximizes the capacity through exploiting the voice characteristic that it can tolerate some level of inconsecutive packet loss. The benefits of the proposed schemes are demonstrated in the simulations results. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A fragment‐based retransmission scheme with quality‐of‐service considerations for wireless networks

In order to satisfy quality‐of‐service requirements for real‐time multimedia applications over wireless networks, IEEE 802.11e has been proposed to enhance wireless‐access functionalities. In IEEE 802.11e, collisions occur frequently as the system load becomes heavy, and then, the latency for successfully transmitting data is lengthened seriously because of contention, handshaking, and backoff overheads for collision avoidance. In this paper, we propose a fragment‐based retransmission (FBR) scheme with quality‐of‐service considerations for IEEE 802.11e‐based wireless local area networks. Our FBR can be used in all proposed fragmentation‐based schemes and greatly decrease redundant transmission overheads. By utilizing FBR, the retransmission delay will be significantly improved to conform strict time requirements for real‐time multimedia applications. We develop an analytical model and a simulation model to investigate the performance of FBR. The capability of the proposed scheme is evaluated by a series of simulations, for which we have encouraging results. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Saturation Throughput Analysis of the IEEE 802.11e EDCA Network with Contention Free Burst Under Fading Channel

The 802.11 WLAN legacy standard cannot provide Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia applications because the 802.11 was initially developed for Best Effort services. Hence, the 802.11e amendment was published in order to provide the QoS support to WLANs. One of the most important functions in 802.11e is the contention based channel access mechanism called Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), which provides a priority scheme by differentiating the Arbitration Inter Frame Space (AIFS), initial window size and Transmission OPportunity limit (TXOPlimit). In this paper, we propose a novel analytical model for the performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11e EDCA network with Contention Free Burst under fading channel and saturated traffic conditions. This new model captures all of the major QoS specific features, namely AIFS, minimum contention window size, maximum contention window size, virtual collision and TXOPlimit. So, we have analyzed the saturation system throughput of the basic access method of the IEEE 802.11e EDCA network.     

Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF in Imperfect Channels

IEEE 802.11 is the most important standard for wireless local area networks (WLANs). In IEEE 802.11, the fundamental medium access control (MAC) scheme is the distributed coordination function (DCF). To understand the performance of WLANs, it is important to analyze IEEE 802.11 DCF. Recently, several analytical models have been proposed to evaluate the performance of DCF under different incoming traffic conditions. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no accurate model that takes into account both the incoming traffic loads and the effect of imperfect wireless channels, in which unsuccessful packet delivery may occur due to bit transmission errors. In this paper, the authors address this issue and provide an analytical model to evaluate the performance of DCF in imperfect wireless channels. The authors consider the impact of different factors together, including the binary exponential backoff mechanism in DCF, various incoming traffic loads, distribution of incoming packet size, queueing system at the MAC layer, and the imperfect wireless channels, which has never been done before. Extensive simulation and analysis results show that the proposed analytical model can accurately predict the delay and throughput performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF under different channel and traffic conditions.     

Providing deterministic quality-of-service guarantees on WDM optical networks

A major challenge in the design of future generation high-speed networks is the provision of guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) for a wide variety of multimedia applications. In this paper we investigate the problem of providing QoS guarantees to real-time variable length messages (e.g., IP packets) in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks. In particular, we propose a systematic mechanism comprised of admission control, traffic regulation, and message scheduling that provide guaranteed performance service for real-time application streams made up of variable-length messages. We formulate an analytical model based on the theory of max-plus algebra to evaluate the deterministic bounded message delay in a WDM network environment using our proposed QoS guarantee mechanism to determine the "schedulability conditions" of multimedia application streams, We also conduct a series of discrete-event and trace-driven simulations to verify the accuracy of the analytical model. The simulation results demonstrate that the analytic delay bound we obtained for our WDM optical network is valid and accurate.     

A survey of QoS enhancements for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

Quality‐of‐service (QoS) is a key problem of today's IP networks. Many frameworks (IntServ, DiffServ, MPLS etc.) have been proposed to provide service differentiation in the Internet. At the same time, the Internet is becoming more and more heterogeneous due to the recent explosion of wireless networks. In wireless environments, bandwidth is scarce and channel conditions are time‐varying and sometimes highly lossy. Many previous research works show that what works well in a wired network cannot be directly applied in the wireless environment. Although IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) is the most widely used IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) standard today, it cannot provide QoS support for the increasing number of multimedia applications. Thus, a large number of 802.11 QoS enhancement schemes have been proposed, each one focusing on a particular mode. This paper summarizes all these schemes and presents a survey of current research activities. First, we analyze the QoS limitations of IEEE 802.11 wireless MAC layers. Then, different QoS enhancement techniques proposed for 802.11 WLAN are described and classified along with their advantages/drawbacks. Finally, the upcoming IEEE 802.11e QoS enhancement standard is introduced and studied in detail. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integration of IEEE 802.11 WLANs with IEEE 802.16-based multihop infrastructure mesh/relay networks: A game-theoretic approach to radio resource management

One of the promising applications of IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX)-based wireless mesh/relay networks is to provide infrastructure/backhaul support for IEEE 802.11-based mobile hotspots. In this article we present an architecture for integrating IEEE 802.11 WLANs with IEEE 802.16-based multihop wireless mesh infrastructure to relay WLAN traffic to the Internet. The major research issues in this integrated architecture are outlined and related work is reviewed. A game-theoretic model is developed for radio resource management in this integrated network architecture. In particular, a multiplayer bargaining game formulation is used for fair bandwidth allocation and optimal admission control of different types of connections (e.g., WLAN connections, relay connections, and connections from standalone subscriber stations) in an IEEE 802.16 base station/mesh router. Both connection-level and inconnection-level performances for this bandwidth management and admission control framework are presented