Priorities in WLANs

Abstract The IETF is currently working on service differentiation in the Internet. However, in wireless environments where bandwidth is scarce and channel conditions are variable, IP differentiated services are sub-optimal without lower layers’ support. In this paper we present four service differentiation schemes for IEEE 802.11. The first one is based on scaling the contention window according to the priority of each flow or user. For different users with different priorities, the second, the third and the fourth mechanisms assign different minimum contention widow values , different interframe spacings and different maximum frame lengths respectively. We simulate and analyze the performance of each scheme with Transport Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol flows.