Impact of polling strategy on capacity of 802.11 based wireless multimedia LANs

Wireless local area networks are a viable technology to support multimedia traffic. One of the prominent wireless local area network standards being adopted as a mature technology is the IEEE 802.11 standard. In wireless multimedia networks, mobile stations will be capable of generating a heterogeneous traffic mix and therefore it is crucial to devise an efficient bandwidth allocation scheme to satisfy the quality of service requirements of each traffic class. In this paper we present a distributed fair queuing scheme which is compatible with the 802.11 standard and can manage bandwidth allocation for delay sensitive traffic. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulation, showing that a distributed version of deficit round robin outperforms the standard round robin service discipline from a capacity viewpoint.