Dynamic traffic regulation for WiFi networks

Abstract

Multimedia applications require high bandwidth in order to assure certain level of Quality of Service (QoS). It is well known that the characteristics of the traffic for multimedia applications are very different from the traditional data traffic that only requires a best effort service. In a network in which terminals communicate multimedia and also traditional data traffic, another important effect is produced: if a bad set of priorities is used neither the data traffic nor the multimedia ones obtain good performance. Sometimes is better to give higher priority to a short traditional data transaction, because it will finish soon leaving free the channel for the multimedia application. This is a hard problem to solve that requires a combination of well known methods.On the other hand, Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) networks have experimented an spectacular growth in last recent years. As a result, they are being used to access multimedia servers allocated in wired networks. Nevertheless, the availability of real bandwidth in current commercial WiFi networks is limited. Therefore, admission control becomes very important to increase the overall system performance. To get real value of this, we combine the admission control with a traffic regulation mechanism. Depending on the requested service, the Access Point (AP) could deny the network access if the required bandwidth is not guaranteed or on the contrary, the access is allowed by reducing the rate of the newly associated station or the rate of some current associated ones.