A token-based scheduling scheme for WLANs supporting voice/data traffic and its performance analysis

Most of the existing medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless local area networks (WLANs) provide prioritized access by adjusting the contention window sizes or interframe spaces for different traffic classes. Those MAC protocols can only provide statistical priority access and limited service differentiation. In this paper, a novel token-based scheduling scheme is proposed for a fully-connected WLAN that supports both voice and data traffic. The proposed scheme can provide guaranteed priority access to voice traffic and, at the same time, provide more precise and quantitative service differentiation for data traffic, which provides great flexibility and facility to the network service provider for service class management. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can guarantee a small delay for voice traffic. For data traffic, it can effectively achieve proportional differentiation among different classes, while achieving fair resource sharing within the same ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TWC
• Authors: Ping Wang, Weihua Zhuang
• Keywords: Contention Based Scheme, Data Traffic, Priority Access, TWC 2008