Scheduling disciplines for multimedia WLANs: embedded round robin and wireless dual queue

Abstract

Wireless local area networks have developed into a promising solution to support advanced data services in untethered environments. Selection of an efficient packet-scheduling scheme is important for managing the bandwidth while satisfying QoS requirements of active sessions having diverse traffic characteristics. The key difficulty is the distributed nature of the queues in the uplink, resulting in the scheduler having to trade off polling greedy stations against wasting resources by polling potentially idle stations. In order to address this, we propose a novel scheduling scheme, "embedded round robin", which dynamically classifies stations as "busy" and "clear". We then extend the previously proposed dual queue scheduling discipline to the case of wireless networks.