Scheduling of Real-time and Nonreal-time Traffics in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN
Abstract: Media Access Control (MAC) Protocol in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN standard supports two types of services, synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous real-time traffic is served by Point Coordination Function (PCF) that implements polling access method. Asynchronous nonreal-time traffic is provided by Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) based on Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. Since real-time traffic is sensitive to delay, and nonreal-time traffic to error and throughput, proper traffic scheduling algorithm needs to be designed. But it is known that the standard IEEE 802.11 scheme is insufficient to serve real-time traffic. In this paper, real-time traffic scheduling and admission control algorithm is proposed. To satisfy the deadline violation probability of the real time traffic the downlink traffic is scheduled before the uplink by Earliest Due Date (EDD) rule. Admission of real-time connection is controlled to satisfy the minimum throughput of nonreal-time traffic which is estimated by exponential smoothing. Simulation is performed to have proper system capacity that satisfies the Quality of Service (QoS) requirement. Tradeoff between real-time and nonreal-time stations is demonstrated. The admission control and the EDD with downlink-first scheduling are illustrated to be effective for the real-time traffic in the wireless LAN.