A Prioritized Access Point Algorithm for 802.11b Networks in a Lossy Environment

In recent years, WLAN technology has been gaining popularity around the world with its sub standard 802.11b receiving major deployments in many indoor and outdoor environments. In this article we investigate the performance of IEEE 802.11b infrastructure networks in the lossless and lossy environments by means of a simulation study. Also, this study shows how the FIFO discipline of the 802.11b MAC affects on the global performance when at least one channel is under the influence of the bursty errors. Furthermore, this paper proposes a channel aware backoff algorithm for the Access Point (AP) to prioritize its transmissions and to accelerate the transmissions in the poor radio channels to enhance the performance of the real time applications. The final results of this simulation study showed that the proposed algorithm is able to enhance the throughput and the delay in lossy environment by an average of 49% and 83% respectively.

[1]  Hai L. Vu.  Collision Probability in Saturated IEEE 802.11 Networks , 2006 .

[2]  A. M. Abdullah,et al.  Wireless lan medium access control (mac) and physical layer (phy) specifications , 1997 .

[3]  A. Trad,et al.  Capacity evaluation of VoIP in IEEE 802.11e WLAN environment , 2006, CCNC 2006. 2006 3rd IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2006..

[4]  R. Srikant,et al.  Fair scheduling in wireless packet networks , 1999, TNET.

[5]  Xiaobo Zhou,et al.  Rate avalanche: Effects on the performance of multi-rate 802.11 wireless networks , 2009, Simul. Model. Pract. Theory.

[6]  Satish K. Tripathi,et al.  Enhancing throughput over wireless LANs using channel state dependent packet scheduling , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '96. Conference on Computer Communications.

[7]  I. Nikolaidis,et al.  Buffer Space Tradeoffs for VoIP QoS in Deflection Networks , 2005 .

[8]  Taka Sakurai,et al.  Collision probability in saturated IEEE 802.11 networks , 2006 .

[9]  Periklis Chatzimisios,et al.  A simple and effective backoff scheme for the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol , 2005 .

[10]  Malathi Veeraraghavan,et al.  Support of voice services in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[11]  Hussein S. Eissa,et al.  Published - Authors' electronic copy - For information only - Not for distribution A u th ors' E lec tron i c C op y ENHANCING THE Wi-Fi PERFORMANCE WITHIN THE ERROR-PRONE CHANNELS , 2009 .

[12]  Ion Stoica,et al.  Packet fair queueing algorithms for wireless networks with location-dependent errors , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[13]  Martin Heusse,et al.  Performance anomaly of 802.11b , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).