A Framework for Enhanced QoS Support in IEEE 802.11e Networks

IEEE 802.11 based WLANs have became popular, but they can only provide best effort services and so they are poorly suitable for multimedia applications. Recently IEEE 802.11e standard has been proposed to support quality of service. The new standard introduces a so-called Hybrid Coordination Function containing two medium access mechanisms: contention-based channel access and controlled channel access. In this paper we propose a novel framework to better support QoS guarantees for multimedia applications. It comprises QoS Manager, Admission Control, Enhanced Scheduler, Predictor and Feedback System. The scheduler adopted supports real-time applications, variable packet sizes and variable bit rate traffic streams. We show that this framework is suitable to be used by applications requesting Application Level Contracts which will be translated in Resource Level Contracts to the scheduler subsystem. The QoS manager component is able to dynamically manage available resources under different load conditions.