SCW: sliding contention window for efficient service differentiation in IEEE 802.11 networks

Many works have recently addressed the IEEE 802.11 QoS issues by proposing different monitoring-based contention window (CW) differentiation techniques. In network saturation, however, it is difficult to guarantee firm services differentiation while achieving high network exploitation. Particularly, most existing QoS-capable MAC protocols rely on a backoff interval sampled from a dynamic range [0 CW_i]. In order to ensure more deterministic service differentiation, we propose a new MAC protocol featuring a sliding contention window (SCW) for each network flow. The different flows are now able to select backoff intervals from different (separated) CW ranges. The SCW dynamically adjusts to changing network conditions, but remains within a per-class predefined range, in order to maintain a separation between different service classes. Simulation results show that compared to the EDCA scheme of 802.11e, SCW consistently excels, in terms of network utilization, strict service separation, and service-level fairness.