Impact of Best Effort Frame Bursting in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Wireless LAN strongly prioritizes high priority traffic over low priority best effort traffic. This causes reduced access to the medium for low priority traffic and under some conditions even leads to starvation. To compensate the throughput reduction of low priority traffic, we propose frame bursting in this paper. That means low priority traffic is sent infrequently, but many frames may be sent in a burst. Our simulation results show that the throughput of the low priority best effort traffic class can be significantly increased without disrupting high priority traffic.