Implementation experiences of bandwidth guarantee on a wireless LAN

Rether(1) was originally developed to support guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) for shared Ethernet LANs. With the growing popularity of wireless LANs, we modified the Rether protocol to provide QoS guarantee on wireless networks. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the Wireless Rether protocol for 802.11 networks. We also describe our experiences with wireless LAN hardware. Wireless Rether supports QoS for TCP and UDP traffic in both upstream and downstream directions. The protocol can seamlessly inter-operate with any priority-based QoS mechanisms (such as Diffserv(2)) on the wired networks that connect the wireless access network to the rest of the Internet. QoS requirements of real-time applications are specified as a simple configurable policy table. Legacy networking applications can benefit from QoS guarantees provided by Wireless Rether without requiring any modifications.