An Intelligent Method for Bandwidth Utilization in IEEE 802.11e Wireless LAN

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN, popularly known as WiFi, has become the admired source of internet connectivity for most of the offices as well as organizations. Due to the rapid growth of multimedia data and VoIP and also to provide better quality of service (QoS), bandwidth and management of bandwidth have become important factors in 802.11 wireless LAN. In 802.11 wireless LAN, Enhanced Distributed Coordination Access (EDCA) mechanism provides QoS with service differentiation by setting different priority to different traffic types. Some of the available methods provide priority based on user category also. In this paper we have proposed an intelligent bandwidth management technique based on the user priority value, traffic priority value and the bandwidth requirement value. By combining these three values, a new metric called request weight value is calculated. Based on this request weight value, dynamically bandwidth is allocated to the users. From the simulation results, we have seen that the proposed method performs well in proper utilization of bandwidth among the available users.