Adaptive Scheduling for VBR Traffic in Wireless LANs

One of the critical issues in multimedia applications is the support of quality of service (QoS) at an acceptable level. IEEE802.11e has proposed a simple scheduler but it proves unable to support QoS in variable bit rate traffic. This paper presents a novel scheduling algorithm named adaptive transmission opportunity (ATX) to support variable bit rate in multimedia services. In the proposed scheduling algorithm, the channel allocation is based on hybrid estimation and error correction according to the actual queuing duration of each mobile station. Compared with other existing scheduling algorithms, it is shown that the introduced novel scheduler enhances channel utilization and significantly improves performance.