Improving of QoS in WiFi access networks

Abstract

A basic WiFi access network provides a poor connectivity and does not support acceptable Quality of Service. The standard IEEE 802.11e includes some Medium Access Control improvements. IEEE 802.11n includes some improvements alone and in combination with Wireless Media Extensions but they are not available in the most current mobile devices and do not provide in practice improved Quality of Service. Those facts provoke the user experiments multimedia service disruptions and a poor Quality of Experience. The mitigation of the adverse effects of these disruptions will be of particular interest in the coming years due to massive access to multimedia information stored in Internet servers. The aim of this chapter is to overview some problems of WiFi access networks, to explain some solutions, and to present a combined tool (that implements these solutions) to allow the user access to multimedia information efficiently. The combined tool allows: Traffic classification to make heterogeneous bandwidth reservation, the management of the dynamic association of static mobile devices to WiFi Access Points to better balance their load sharing (number of associated mobile devices), and the management of Access Points' load sharing, guiding mobile devices to another position so that they may be associated to a low load sharing Access Point. The tool is an application's level software based on manager/agent architecture. The agents manage link level's information picked up in the mobile device and the manager regulates the access to the Internet in the Access Points. There are some works that implement solutions for the problems reviewed in this chapter, but there are not tools like the one presented here. The chapter's main contribution is the combination of these solutions to practical case studies. The experimental results presented in this chapter demonstrate that the tool improves the QoS of WiFi access networks. © 2012, IGI Global.