Intra-flow Contention Scheme for Improving QoS in WLAN

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of wireless local area network(WLAN),the demand for multimedia services encompassing VoIP, multimedia streaming and interactive gaming is increasing rapidly. The real-time services require stringent Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for effective communication. While a lot of research has dealt with providing QoS support for real-time services in traditional wired networks, the shared and broadcast nature of the wireless medium necessitates the design of new solutions for wireless networks. In wireless networks, unlike wired networks, the communication from one node will consume the bandwidth of the neighboring nodes and hence the shared bandwidth can be easily over-utilized. Therefore, to provide an acceptable level of QoS for the real-time services, it is necessary to control the utilization of the shared bandwidth. In this paper , we propose an efficient admission control scheme named Intra-flow contention scheme with CAC-OLSR routing protocol for WLAN networks which aims at preserving the QoS for all the admitted flows by employing a low overhead threshold mechanism. We describe several alternatives for the design of IAC and compare the performance of these alternatives using simulation results.