Flow-level QoS guarantees in IEEE 802.11e EDCA-based WLANs

by Bellalta Jiménez, Boris

Abstract WLANs provide a broadband access to Internet from a mobile terminal, which can be a possible alternative solution to cellular networks. However, this technology presents several limitations, as it is the difficult coexistence between rigid traffic flows (VoIP) and elastic traffic flows (TCP), due to the medium access protocol itself. In this thesis a new admission control mechanism is proposed. It uses the set of QoS mechanisms provided by the new EDCA standard. The use of the proposed admission control mechanism improves the overall WLAN performance, solving the different technology limitations. In order to be able to evaluate and optimize the admission control mechanism, several mathematical tools have been developed in order to capture the dynamics of both, the access protocol and of the different multimedia traffic flows that have been considered.