Adaptive QoS in 802.11e Wireless Networks for Lunar Communications

Lunar surface communications present specific problems that can be solved with well established terrestrial networking standards such as 802.11. Unfortunately, 802.11 has limitations regarding high priority traffic such as voice and command data which are sensitive to jitter, delay, and loss. The IEEE 802.11e standard provides enhancements that allow traffic with specific needs to be differentiated from normal traffic. While these enhancements have been shown to effectively improve latency and throughput for high priority traffic, they do not offer precise nor consistent control of performance levels. In this paper capacity and priority are explored in the context of lunar communications using 802.11g with 802.11e. We present a method to dynamically optimize 802.11e contention parameters to provide more granular control over the network´s quality of service (QoS) for the various flow types. A distributed adaptive algorithm that extends 802.11e´s enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) is presented. We show that the enhancement provides more granular and consistent performance than that provided by the static algorithm used in standard 802.11e.