Extending End-to-End QoS to WiFi based WLAN
Wireless LANs have become ubiquitous, and are being used to access multi-media services. Earlier wireless standards 802.11a/b/g do not provide any mechanism to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) in a wireless network. IEEE adopted 802.11e about a year ago. This enhancement makes it possible
to prioritize traffic, but to get real value out of this, we need to have end-to-end solutions in place. This white paper examines this problem and proposes some solutions.
Applications such as VoIP, IPTV, VoD have very different requirements on the network traffic compared to the traditional interactive and background applications. IEEE standard 802.11e addresses these QoS requirements in a WiFi based WLAN. It provides enhancements to the MAC layer protocol for supporting both prioritized and parameterized traffic between a QSTA and a QAP. To address the end-to-end QoS needs, the link level QoS supported by 802.11e standard should be used in conjunction with existing end-to-end QoS mechanisms such as RSVP and SIP/SDP. Here we propose a mechanism to extend the end-to-end QoS into the WiFi based WLAN.
The last few years have witnessed tremendous growth in the use of WiFi based WLAN for multimedia applications such as VoIP, VoD and Internet Radio. The characteristics of the data traffic for these applications are very different from the traditional internet traffic. For example VoD requires high bandwidth while VoIP is burst in nature and requires low delay and jitter....
