Expedited forwarding for WiFi

Abstract

It is essential to reserve resources in order to provide an acceptable quality of service in networks with real-time communication requirements. However, such reserved resources, e.g. bandwidth, may be unused as a consequence of the variations in the actual resource demands. Since bandwidth is scarce in wireless LANs (WLANs), QoS provisioning may be very expensive. Therefore, we propose a new resource management approach leading to a more efficient usage of the network in which communicating stations or end-users dynamically hand over some of the free resources temporarily to the other communication neighbors. This paper concentrates on two fundamental problems of such a demand-based sharing of resources: the current estimation of resource utilization, and the algorithm to share and redistribute resources with real-time requirements. This approach for resource and traffic management allows one to achieve significantly better utilization of network resources.