Channel time allocation scheme based on feedback information in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

The IEEE 802.11e standard defines a set of quality of service (QoS) enhancements for wireless local area network (WLAN) applications such as voice and streaming multimedia traffic. In the standard, a new medium access control (MAC) protocol is called the hybrid coordinator function (HCF), and also a channel access scheme to transmit multimedia traffic is called the HCF controlled channel access (HCCA). In the IEEE 802.11e WLANs, to satisfy the stringent real-time constraints of multimedia services it is very important to provide an efficient method of allocating network resources. In this regard, we propose a feedback-assisted dynamic channel time allocation scheme considering the application layer information in order to achieve better performance of multimedia traffic over IEEE 802.11e HCCA under the constrained QoS requirements. Performance of the proposed scheme is investigated by simulation. Our results show that under typical channel error conditions, the proposed scheme is very effective regardless of the variation of station numbers and service intervals. Also, it yields high performances while guaranteeing the delay bound.