A QoS guaranteeing MAC layer protocol for the "underdog" traffic

Abstract

With the tremendous boom in the wireless local area network arena, there has been a phenomenal spike in the web traffic which has been triggered by the growing popularity of real-time multimedia applications. Towards this end, the IEEE 802.11e medium access control (MAC) standard specifies a set of quality-of-service (QoS) enhancement features to ensure QoS for these delay sensitive multimedia applications. Most of these features are unfair and inefficient from the perspective of low priority (non-real time) traffic flows as they tend to starve the non-real time flows depriving them of appropriate channel access, hence throughput. To that extent, this article proposes a MAC protocol that ensures fairness in the overall network performance by still providing QoS for real-time traffic without starving the "underdog" or non-real-time flows. The article first presents analytical expressions supported by Matlab simulation results which highlight the performance drawbacks of biased protocols such as 802.11e. It then evaluates the efficiency of the proposed "fair MAC protocol" through extensive simulations conducted on the QualNet simulation platform. The simulation results validate the fairness aspect of the proposed scheme.