Admission control scheme based on priority access for wireless LANs

In order to support the quality of service (QoS) requirements at the medium access control (MAC) layer, the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) has been developed in IEEE 802.11e standard. However, it cannot guarantee the stringent real-time constraints of multimedia applications such as voice and video without an efficient method of controlling network loads. In this paper, we propose a measurement-based admission control scheme, which is made up of two parts: priority access and admission control. First, in order to measure the channel status per traffic type, we propose a priority access mechanism in which each priority traffic is distinguished by a busy tone, and separately performs its own packet transmission operation. Then, admission control mechanism protects existing flows from new ones, and maintains the QoS of the admitted flows based on the measured channel status information. Performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulation. Our results show that the proposed scheme is very effective in guaranteeing the QoS of multimedia applications as well as in avoiding the performance starvation of low priority traffics.