Service differentiation in Wireless Local Area Networks

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have significantly developed as a means to provide Internet access at many places. There are different types of Internet traffic over WLANs such as data and voice, with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This raises the need for the provision of service differentiation in WLANs. The traditional approach prioritizes voice over data, which gives an incentive for data applications to mark themselves as voice to gain higher QoS. This may lead to the degradation of the whole network and hence worsen QoS perceived by end users. In contrast, the service differentiation scheme proposed in my thesis provides different but equal services for different traffic types, which can eliminate the incentive mentioned above and has simple implementation.