Adaptive Admission Control Mechanism for IEEE 802.11e WLANs

A novel flow admission control mechanism for infrastructure IEEE 802.11e EDCA-based WLANs is presented. The proposed admission control works jointly with a tuning algorithm which decides the most suitable configuration of the MAC parameters each time a new flow arrives or leaves the system. It is designed to work in heterogeneous scenarios with both elastic and real-time flows, so it aims to: i) guarantee the QoS requirements for real-time flows (like VoIP) and ii) maximize the best-effort throughput (such as TCP web browsing or P2P transfers). Results, compared with the use of the DCF (distributed coordination function) and EDCA (enhanced distributed channel access) with static parameters, show a clear improvement on the overall HotSpot performance. Our mechanism provides better QoS, uplink versus downlink fairness and a more efficient use of the transmission resources.