A Novel Approach to Prioritized Bandwidth Management in 802.11e WLAN

Abstract

Providing reliable bandwidth for end users anywhere and anytime is the critical goal for the wireless community. There are lots of bandwidth management scheme available for wireless network. For bandwidth management in 802.11 wireless LAN, EDCA (enhanced distributed channel access) provides service differentiation by providing different priority for different traffic category. There is no any specific bandwidth management scheme based on user type or user category. Most of the bandwidth management scheme treats all the users with equal priority. In this paper, we have proposed a bandwidth management scheme for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN which is based on user priority. For this we have considered three types of users: high priority, medium priority and low priority. The proposed bandwidth management scheme allocates the available bandwidth to high priority users first irrespective of the traffic type, then to medium priority users and low priority users are entertained at last based on the availability of the bandwidth resources. For evaluating the performance of the proposed method, five parameters are taken. These are traffic received, traffic sent, data dropped, delay and throughput. From the comparative analysis, we have observed that the proposed algorithm can give fair bandwidth allocation to the higher priority user on demand. From the simulation results it is also seen that the high priority users achieve good quality of service in every aspect compared to medium and lower priority users.