A Novel Access Method for Supporting Absolute and Proportional Priorities in 802.11 WLANs

Many researchers have addressed the problem of QoS differentiation in 802.11 wireless networks, however no method proposed so far benefits from all desirable properties: high aggregate throughput even for a large number of contending stations, fair allocation to all stations in the same class, fast adaptation to changing conditions, and support for absolute priorities. If the authors consider the IEEE 802.11e standard, its EDCA (Enhanced Distributed Channel Access) access method suffers from an increased collision rate when the number of stations increases. In this paper, they propose a novel access method that supports both relative proportional throughput allocation and absolute priorities in 802.11 wireless networks.