A Credit-Based Home Access Point (CHAP) to Improve Application Performance on IEEE 802.11 Networks

Expanded high speed Internet availability and decreased wireless technology costs have increased the number of residential computers wirelessly connected to the Internet. While residential users run applications with a wide range of network requirements, these applications receive identical treatment from most wireless Access Points (APs). Although delay sensitive applications can suffer increased latency in the presence of throughput intensive applications, wireless APs contain few tools to mitigate these effects beyond explicitly classifying traffic based on port numbers or host IP addresses. The authors propose a Credit-based Home Access Point (CHAP) that features credit-based queue management designed to eliminate the need for explicit AP configuration of per-application quality.