A cognitive QoS management framework for WLANs

Abstract

Due to the precipitous growth of wireless networks and the paucity of spectrum, more interference is imposed to the wireless terminals which constraints their performance. In order to preserve such performance degradation, this paper proposes a framework which uses cognitive radio techniques for quality of service (QoS) management of wireless local area networks (LANs). The framework incorporates radio environment maps as input to a cognitive decision engine that steers the network to optimize its QoS parameters such as throughput. A novel experimentally verified heuristic physical model is developed to predict and optimize the throughput of wireless terminals. The framework was applied to realistic stationary and time-variant interference scenarios where an average throughput gain of 344% was achieved in the stationary interference scenario and 70% to 183% was gained in the time-variant interference scenario.