Noncooperative admission control for differentiated services in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

The IEEE 802.11 working group has been developing a new distributed MAC, called the enhanced distributed function (EDCF), to support service differentiation in the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Besides, highspeed WLAN environments are also expected to provide wireless Internet services in hot spots such as airports, parks, etc. Since there are usually multiple service providers competing for providing wireless network access in hot spots, mobile users are free to choose their own service providers. In this paper, we analyze the resource management problem in the competitive environment, in which the EDCF protocol is implemented in all access points (APs) and mobile stations. We formulate admission control as a game and prove the game owns a Nash equilibrium solution. Based on the game, a service provider not only fulfills, for the most part, the QoS satisfaction of ongoing flows but also increases its own revenue. We evaluate the performance by means of throughput, packet delay and bandwidth violation ratio.