Wi-Fi QoS Management Program: Bridging the QoS Gap of Multimedia Traffic in Wi-Fi Networks

A big challenge for Wi-Fi has always been reliable QoS support. In particular, with the advent of more challenging and QoS-sensitive applications, such as cloud gaming, live streaming, and AR/VR, nowadays the need for QoS support in Wi-Fi networks has become much more critical than ever before. A recent Wi-Fi Alliance specification, Wi-Fi QoS Management, aims to address this issue by introducing several mechanisms and best practices to bridge the critical QoS gap of multimedia traffic in Wi-Fi networks. In this article, as leaders in Wi-Fi Alliance's Wi-Fi QoS Management, as well as Wireless Broadband Alliance's E2E QoS work items, we describe these new mechanisms included in the Wi-Fi QoS Management program, provide quantitative results when these mechanisms are enabled, and elaborate on future considerations and prospects for QoS in Wi-Fi networks. Our lab trial results show that using Wi-Fi QoS Management mechanisms provide considerable improvement in terms of critical application-level QoS metrics, such as delay and resolution in challenging multimedia applications, such as GeForce NOW, cloud gaming, and Twitch, live streaming in a non-intrusive and standardized fashion. We hope these results provide incentive for operating system and application developers to enable the required support to exploit the QoS mechanism(s) supported in the underlying Wi-Fi implementation.