The IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless networks has been recently enhanced with the IEEE 802.11e amendment which introduces Quality of Service support. It provides differentiation mechanisms at the Medium Access Control layer, using two additional access functions: the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) function and the HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA) function. Only the HCCA mechanism is suitable for serving traffic streams with real-time requirements such as multimedia applications and Voice Over IP. The IEEE 802.11e standard does not specify a mandatory HCCA scheduling algorithm, but it offers a reference scheduler as the guideline in the resources scheduling design.In this paper we analyze four HCCA alternative schedulers to the reference one. They offer real-time guarantees proposing different solutions to the request of QoS and real-time support expressed by the increasing diffusion of multimedia applications. A performance evaluation is conducted to show the main differences between the considered schedulers, including the reference one.The results show that under several scenarios there is not a unique best scheduler, but there exists a variety of solutions depending on the specified requirements. The conclusions of the paper offer some guidelines in the choice of the scheduler tailored for a particular scenario of interest

The IEEE 802.11e standard introduces Quality of Service support for wireless local area networks through two MAC functions: Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) and HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA). While the former provides prioritized contention-based access to the medium, the latter uses a parameterized contention-free polling scheme. Several studies have proposed enhancements to EDCA or improved scheduling algorithms for HCCA to properly support VBR traffic. However, the cooperation between these functions has only marginally been considered and the solutions vary depending on specific traffic requirements.\ud In this paper we propose a novel approach to address the problem of scheduling VBR traffic streams. Our scheduler, named Overboost, uses HCCA to negotiate a minimum bandwidth and deals with traffic streams that require more bandwidth than the negotiated one by redirecting the excess bandwidth to the EDCA function. An analytical evaluation has been conducted and the results has been corroborated by an extensive set of simulations. They show that the overall scheduler improves the performance with respect to other HCCA schedulers in terms of null rate, throughput, access delay, and queue length

Quality of Service (QoS) provided by the IEEE 802.11e amendment and by the proposed HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA) reference scheduler is tailored for Constant Bit Rate traffic streams. Moreover the numerous alternative scheduling algorithms are not suitable to serve Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic streams with the required QoS and real-time guarantees.This paper presents Immediate Dynamic TXOP HCCA (IDTH), a new scheduling algorithm based on a bandwidth reclaiming mechanism suitable to cooperate with a HCCA real-time scheduler. IDTH recovers the portion of the transmission time unused by the scheduled stations to provide a further capacity for the next variable bit rate traffic streams. The transmission opportunity of the next scheduled station is assigned considering the available spare resources and the previously used ones. The scheduling analysis and the simulations results show that IDTH is suitable to reduce the delay experienced by VBR traffic streams, to efficiently deal with the variability of multimedia traffic and to avoid waste of resources.

IEEE 802.11e HCCA reference scheduler guarantees Quality of\ud Service only for Constant Bit Rate traffic streams, whereas its as-\ud signment of scheduling parameters (transmission time TXOP and\ud polling period) is too rigid to serve Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic.\ud This paper presents a new scheduling algorithm, Dynamic TXOP\ud HCCA (DTH). Its scheduling scheme, integrated with the central-\ud ized scheduler, uses both a statistical estimation of needed trans-\ud mission duration and a bandwidth reclaiming mechanism with the\ud aim of improving the resource management and providing an in-\ud stantaneous dynamic Transmission Opportunity (TXOP), tailored\ud to multimedia applications with variable bit rate. Performance evaluation through simulation, confirmed by the scheduling analysis, shows that DTH is suitable to reduce the transmission queues length.\ud This positively impacts on the delay and on packets drop rate experienced by VBR traffic streams

No abstract