Scheduling of real-time and nonreal-time traffics in IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

Media Access Control (MAC) Protocol in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN standard supports two types of services, synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous real-time traffic is served by Point Coordination Function (PCF) that implements polling access method. Asynchronous nonreal-time traffic is provided by Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) based on Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. Since real-time traffic is sensitive to delay, and nonreal-time traffic to error and throughput, proper traffic scheduling algorithm needs to be designed. But it is known that the standard IEEE 802.11 scheme is insufficient to serve real-time traffic. In this paper, real-time traffic scheduling and admission control algorithm is proposed. To satisfy the deadline violation probability of the real-time traffic the downlink traffic is scheduled before the uplink by Earliest Due Date (EDD) rule. Admission of real-time connection is controlled to satisfy the minimum throughput of nonreal-time traffic which is estimated by exponential smoothing. Simulation is performed to have proper system capacity that satisfies the Quality of Service (QoS) requirement. Tradeoff between real-time and nonreal-time stations is demonstrated. The admission control and the EDD with downlink-first scheduling are illustrated to be effective for the real-time traffic in the wireless LAN.