Starvation prevention and quality of service in wireless LANs

The existing IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is not suitable for supporting multimedia and QoS-sensitive applications because of its inherent lack of QoS support and fairness. Extensions to the MAC protocol to include QoS enabling mechanisms have been proposed in the literature, but they suffer from unfair allocation of bandwidth between high and low priority traffic as well as from variability of throughput and delay. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel fair bandwidth allocation mechanism based on deficit round robin scheduling. Service differentiation is provided by translating the user throughput requirements into the 802.11 MAC interframe space parameter. We show via simulations that the proposed mechanism provides low variability of throughput and delay and has the advantage of low complexity.