FairWLAN – IP Level QoS Mechanism for Large Wireless LANs

Without traffic classification, WiFi access points try to distribute instantly available bandwidth equally among the several stations. Stations which perform sporadic use of the network, such as those used for browsing the WWW, will have to share bandwidth when they need it, even though they consume no resources for most of the time. We believe that a fairer method for resource allocation should take into account the usage history, both recent and historical, of each station. Also, in order to maximise the global capacity of a WiFi network, radio conditions for each station may be taken into account.In this paper, we present FairWLAN, a QoS management system for large Wireless LANs, that retrieves information on each station associated to each access point to drive the configuration of the QoS mechanisms on the upstream router.