Traffic scheduling for multimedia QoS over wireless LANs

In this paper we present a novel traffic scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.11e, referred to as ARROW (Adaptive Resource Reservation Over WLANs), able to handle multimedia traffic. The novel characteristic of ARROW is that it performs channel allocations based on the actual traffic (not estimated traffic) buffered in the various mobile stations. Additionally, a variation of ARROW is studied for improving the performance for constant bit rate traffic. The ARROW algorithm and its enhancement are evaluated against two other schedulers found in the literature, namely the Simple Scheduler and SETT-EDD. Results from a detailed simulation model show that much better channel utilization and considerably improved performance can be provided.