Adaptive Weighted and Prioritized Polling for QoS provision in wireless networks

State of the art wireless networking solutions are expected to efficiently support time-bounded traffic, while serving legacy data transmissions. The dominant relevant approach at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer is the IEEE Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol. EDCA achieves traffic differentiation to some degree, however, its distributed nature raises grate limitations. This work introduces a general purpose access mechanism, specialized to operate inside a wireless cell and capable of providing deterministic QoS support, while demanding no resource reservation. The proposed Adaptive Weighted and Prioritized Polling (AWPP) protocol succeeds to differentiate traffic in a predictable and proportional manner, achieve high channel utilization, and provide fairness in resource allocation. AWPP is shown to outperform EDCA.