Fair Scheduling of Real-time Traffic over Wireless LANs

With the advent of the IEEE 802.11 wireless networks that provide high speed connectivity, demand for supporting multiple real-time traffic applications over wireless LANs has been increasing. A natural question is how to provide fair resource allocation to real-time traffic in wireless LANs. Wireless networks are subject to unpredictable location-dependent error bursts, which is different from wired networks. We propose a fair real-time scheduling model whose goal is to minimize the maximum loss rate among all the flows and additionally to maximize the overall throughput. We develop algorithms for this scheduling model that takes the wireless channel error characteristics into consideration.