Bio-inspired rate control scheme for IEEE 802.11e WLANs

The uncontrolled use of limited resources in conjunction with unpredictable nature of traffic load injection in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) may lead to congestion, and cannot guarantee strict Quality of Service (QoS) required by real-time service. Rate control is an important mechanism for the provisioning of QoS in the IEEE 802.11e WLANs. In this paper, a bio-inspired rate control scheme is proposed based on the extended Lotka-Volterra model, which considers the effects of arrival traffic on the system stability according to the limited network resources and competitions with others traffic flows, and ensures that the network works in unsaturated case and rapidly converge to a global stable equilibrium point (EP). Moreover, all traffic flows are of peaceful coexistence and QoS differentiation. Extensive simulations are conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed rate control scheme.