An Admission Control and Traffic Regulation Mechanism for Infrastructure WiFi networks

In a Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) network it is well known that large periods of contention, the intermittent disruptions of the service and limited bandwidth represent a handicap for interactive realtime multimedia applications since they demand high troughput and real time constraints, e.g. Video on Demand (VoD) or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Nevertheless, it is very common to use WiFi networks as a wireless access networks for multimedia servers allocated in a wired networks (normally in the edge of the fixed kernel network). In this scenario, wireless stations wishing to access to multimedia contents must contend with wireless stations wishing to transmit less priority traffic. Despite the efforts that are being done by different task groups within 802.11 standards to provide Quality of Service (QoS) and to increase the physical data rate, admission control becomes very important to improve the overall system performance. In this paper, we combine an admission control mechanism and a traffic regulation mechanism. The basic idea of our resultant mechanism is that depending on the requested service, the Access Point (AP) could deny the network access if the required bandwidth is not guaranteed or on the contrary, the access is granted reducing the rate of the newly associated station or the rate of some current associated ones. Experimental results show that this is a suitable way to distribute the bandwidth among the associated wireless stations.