Deterministic service on IEEE 802.11-like networks

Wireless IEEE 802.11 networks are typically deployed as a convenient and flexible way to access wired backbones. However, due to the inherently shared nature and physical properties of their communication medium, performance limits are easily reached. Some standard medium access control (MAC) solutions trade simplicity for performance yielding an overall throughput possibly much lower than the actual transmission rate. Moreover, given that many applications with real-time requirements, such as VoIP phones, IPTV, videoconferencing, distributed gaming, are getting increasingly deployed and important to users, it is mandatory for the wireless access to support them. However, the delay and jitter introduced by current IEEE 802.11 standard MAC solutions in some critical, although not uncommon, scenarios can be unacceptable for real-time applications. This work proposes a novel MAC solution for wireless networks that can offer deterministic quality of service for priority traffic while fully supporting statistical multiplexing and possibly increasing the aggregated network throughput. Being based on IEEE 802.11 physical layers and integrating some of the IEEE 802.11 MAC mechanisms, the implementation can leverage on existing components to take advantage of their economy of scale. The throughput and delay achieved with the proposed solution are compared with the ones of standard IEEE 802.11 protocols in various simulation scenarios.