A Service/Device Differentiation Scheme for Contention-Tone-Based Wireless LAN Protocol

A contention-tone-based wireless local area network (WLAN) protocol uses out-of-band signaling for contention resolution to achieve efficient medium access. It is shown that such a protocol can operate at near-optimal channel utilization in the medium access control (MAC) layer. This paper addresses the service differentiation design aspect of a contention-tone-based WLAN protocol. In particular, service and device differentiation schemes are proposed to fulfill a particular quality of service (QoS) for data packet transmissions for contention-tone-based WLANs. Our analysis shows that our design not only provides bandwidth differentiation that matches that specified in the IEEE 802.11e standard but operates at near-optimal channel utilization as well. Our design also incorporates device differentiation to eliminate the access-point bottleneck problem in WLANs. Analytical and simulation results confirm the performance advantages of our design.