Protection and guarantee for voice and video traffic in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

In order to support multimedia applications such as voice and video over the wireless medium, a contention-based channel access function, called enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCF), is being developed in the emerging standard IEEE 802.11e. In EDCF, differentiated services are provided for different traffic classes. In this paper, we propose a two-level protection and guarantee mechanism for voice and video traffic in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs. In the first-level protection, the existing voice and video flows are protected from the new and other existing voice and video flows. In the second-level protection, the voice and video flows are protected from the best-effort data traffic. For each protection level, a couple of protection mechanisms are proposed. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed two-level protection and guarantee mechanism is very effective in terms of protecting and guaranteeing existing voice and video flows as well as fully utilizing the channel capacity