Performance of a Token Bucket traffic shaper on a real IEEE 802.11 test-bed

The scientific and industrial community spends many efforts trying to provide quality of service to IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. However, experimentation is quite difficult nowadays using real equipment available in the market. This situation remains the same until the approval of a standard. This paper proposes an alternative that can be implemented on a real environment as it does not modify at all the 802.11 MAC layer. This solution basically inserts a traffic shaper between the IP and MAC layer. QoS mechanisms are based on traffic handling mechanisms and bandwidth management mechanisms. The aim of the experiments is to evaluate the performance after applying a token bucket filter on a real test-bed of up to 11 mobile stations