Analysis of temporal and throughput fair scheduling in multirate WLANs

The IEEE 802.11e Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) provides controlled access features that can be used in conjunction with scheduling algorithms to provide guaranteed per-session services. However, the multirate operation of the WLAN complicates the design of scheduling and Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning algorithms. We propose a new solution based on Controlled Access Phase Scheduling (CAPS) framework, introduced for fixed rate WLANs in our earlier works, and employ a new fair central scheduler to achieve guaranteed fair services in a WLAN. We examine the fairness issues involved in designing such an algorithm and study several fair scheduling algorithms that can be used with CAPS. We present a modified start time fair queuing based scheduler as our choice and analyze its performance under dynamic and static multirate operation. The algorithm is then evaluated through several simulation experiments. We show that the enhanced CAPS is able to adapt to multirate environments and provide both temporal and throughput fair services in 802.11e WLANs.