Service differentiation at the MAC level in the wireless segment of IEEE 802.11 WLANs

The main goal of this work is to introduce packet-scheduling disciplines at the MAC level of IEEE 802.11 WLANs to effectively achieve service differentiation in the wireless segment, which will be essential if multiple services, with diverse QoS requirements, are to be offered in such networks. Some work has been done in this direction but, in the authors' opinion, there is still something missing: in some cases the differentiation is not over the wireless segment but it is done locally within the AP or within a mobile station, or it is performed at the IP layer only, or the decisions are made with incomplete information, etc. In this work we propose and analyze two mechanisms in which the AP and the mobiles cooperate to achieve service differentiation at the MAC level.