Enhanced layer 3 service differentiation for WLAN

  • Authors:
  • W. L. Pang;Nurul Nadia;David Chieng

  • Affiliations:
  • Faculty of Engineering, Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Malaysia;Faculty of Engineering, Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Malaysia;BT Innovate, British Telecommunications Malaysia Research Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

  • Venue:
  • WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on SYSTEMS
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The existing wireless networks are dominated by IEEE802.11a/b/g that only provides the best effort services to the wireless end users. All the wireless users and services are traded equally without any Quality of Service (QoS) feature embedded in the existing wireless system. The IEEE802.11e Medium Access Control (MAC) is introduced to provide QoS to the Local Area Network (WLAN) users, but it involves significant investment in money and time to migrate the existing systems to the new IEEE802.11e systems. We proposed an Enhanced Layer 3 Service Differentiation (EL3SD) scheme for the existing WLAN systems to provide QoS to the WLAN end users. The EL3SD is a software approach that operates above the IEEE802.11 MAC to maintain the existing wireless network architectures and devices. A queuing mechanism is added in a gateway between the wired and wireless WLAN. Simulations have been carried out with IEEE802.11b and IEEE802.11e systems. Four queuing mechanisms are selected in the simulation; the Class based Queuing (CBQ), Deficit Round Robin (DRR), Fair Queuing (FQ) and Stochastic Fair Queuing (SFQ). The FQ and CBQ are capable to provide flows differentiation under heavy downlink scenario, but the CBQ is programmable to provide users differentiation to the end users. This is something extra that is not available in the IEEE802.11e and the network administrator controls the WLAN bandwidth distribution through the CBQ.