Priority access for QoS support in distributed wireless networks

Guaranteed quality of service (QoS) support has been an open issue of distributed wireless networks for years. The IEEE 802.11e provides a valuable method for this purpose. However, it could only provide service differentiation, rather than service guarantee, for multi-priority traffic. Many studies have tried to improve its QoS ability, but still leave some problems. This paper investigates these problems and proposes a scheme called the priority access based on busy tone (PABT) to improve the QoS performance. To guarantee the priority channel access, this scheme uses an in-band busy tone to limit the transmission of lower-priority traffic when higher-priority traffic has packets to send. Based on that, it also optimizes the contention window tuning according to the flows number of each traffic type individually, in order to improve the throughput as well as the traffic capacity. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the real-time traffic capacity, throughput, delay, fairness and packet loss rate.