Admission Control and Scheduling of Isochronous Traffic in IEEE 802.11ad MAC

Abstract

An upsurge of low latency and bandwidth hungry applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality and availability of unlicensed spectrum in the mmWave band at 60 GHz have led to standardization of the next generation WiFi such as IEEE 802.11ad and 802.11ay. Due to the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirement of those applications, 802.11ad/ay have introduced contention free channel access called Service Period, which provides dedicated channel access exclusively reserved for communication between a pair of nodes. One type of user traffic supported by IEEE 802.11ad is isochronous traffic, which is essentially periodic traffic that requires certain channel time to be allocated before its period ends. So, isochronous traffic needs guaranteed channel time allocation with stringent deadlines. In this paper, we present three Admission Control Algorithms (ACAs) which admit isochronous requests to achieve the above goals while being fair. We also present an Earliest Deadline First (EDF) based scheduling algorithm for isochronous traffic. We evaluate the performance of the three ACAs in terms of different performance metrics. Our simulation results show that, out of the three ACAs, the proportional fair allocation based algorithm offers the best tradeoff across different performance metrics.