An efficient scheduling mechanism for IEEE 802.11e MAC enhancements

To guarantee the delay and jitter bounds for real-time traffic, the polling scheme is commonly used in the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol. However, the polling overhead becomes significant when the continuous and periodic real-time traffic is served. We propose a scheduling mechanism by which wireless stations can issue their frame transmissions automatically without too much indication from the system. The system can initiate a scheduling access phase (SAP) on the channel at anytime during which the scheduled stations can do data transmissions. We specify the transmissions of wireless stations being scheduled in a way of ordered contentions within the SAP. The contending feature can bring the advantages of easy implementation and high channel utilization.