A New Mechanism to Provide QoS in IEEE 802.11 MAC

This paper proposes a new mechanism to support Medium Access Control (MAC)-level Quality-of-Service (QoS) in IEEE 802.11. Several slots are assembled together to form a super slot, and every slot in the super slot is designated for a given priority traffic to send frames. The slot assignment is done according to the traffic priority. The highest priority traffic is sent at the first slot in a super slot and the lowest priority traffic is sent at the last one. By the arrangement on the sending order, if many stations with different priority traffic want to send frames in a super slot all together, only the highest priority traffic of them can get the transmission opportunity (TXOP). This new priority scheme is robust and provides good performance on throughput, MAC delay and frame dropping probability for the high priority traffic. This new mechanism can improve the performance of IEEE 802.11e EDCA greatly.