Enhanced controlled-access and contention-based algorithms for IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

The 802.11e standard draft provides new features for supporting QoS in the MAC layer of the popular 802.11 wireless LAN standard. These features, however, do not provide the final solution, and the standard intentionally leaves the door open for further enhancements using these features. In this article we present our standard-based solutions for enhancing the performance of the 802.11e MAC. The proposed solutions work with the contention and controlled access parts of the 802.11e. For contention access we use dynamic configuration of the MAC parameters and increase the throughput significantly. For controlled access, we introduce an alternative to the PCF round robin polling and propose a fair scheduling algorithm that uses the 802.11e features and provides fair and prioritized access to individual stations or queues.