Distributed contention-free traffic scheduling in IEEE 802.11 multimedia networks

Wireless local area networks are a promising solution to support advanced data services in mobile environments. The IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard is emerging as a mature technology to support delay sensitive network services. In order to support these services the standard has proposed the use of a polling scheme; however, existing polling schemes require high communication overheads or suffer from unfairness. In this paper, we propose a distributed fair queueing algorithm, “distributed deficit round robin”, which is compatible with the 802.11 medium access control rules. Software simulation of this scheme shows that it can manage a heterogeneous mix of delay sensitive traffic. Key Words— Round robin, Fair queueing, Medium access control, Polling, Scheduling, Wireless local area networks