Providing Utility-Optimal Throughput Guarantees in Wireless LANs

With the pervasive use of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (LANs), increasingly more application flows with different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements will be deployed therein, e.g., home multimedia. This paper is concerned with providing utility-optimal throughput guarantees when diverse application flows share the limited bandwidth. Our proposal provides the absolute throughput guarantees for inelastic flows (such as Internet Protocol television) and the proportional throughput guarantees for elastic flows (such as text message) while maximizing the entire system bandwidth utilization. To this end, we first establish a general theoretical framework on the utility-optimal problem. We then present the exact and approximate solutions and prove the existence and uniqueness of the approximate solution. Finally, extensive simulations are performed, which validate that the approximate solution can well achieve the desired objectives.