WONS 2004

Madonna di Campiglio
(Trento, Italy)
January 21-23, 2004

First Working Conference
on
Wireless On-demand Network Systems

(sponsored by IFIP WG 6.3 and 6.8)

Analytical Modeling of a Traffic Differentiation Strategy for 802.11

Luca Vollero (University of Naples, Federico II),
Giulio Iannello (University of Naples, Federico II)

Abstract - In this paper a modification to the MAC layer of the IEEE 802.11 standard is proposed to handle traffic differentiation in infrastructure configurations, i.e. configurations where multiple mobile stations communicate with one or more base stations, acting as bridges for the wireless connections. Our proposal is based on introducing a selective acknowledgment schema at the base station side, which differentiates the network congestion status perceived by the mobile stations. The approach can be implemented at firmware level without changes at the physical layer and involves only the base station, leaving the mobile stations unmodified. To evaluate the effectiveness of the approach we extend previous probabilistic analysis of the 802.11 MAC layer in saturation conditions to deal with the modified MAC strategy. The analysis reveals that the proposed differentiation mechanism is effective in protecting bandwidth resources assigned to privileged stations under a wide range of situations.
Published in:
ROBERTO BATTITI, RENATO LO CIGNO, MARCO CONTI (editors)
Wireless On-Demand Network Systems
Proceedings of WONS2004
Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS2928, Springer 2004.

Pages 393-398

To browse the conference proceedings, please go to the Springer's LNCS2928 Page.