Providing throughput guarantees in IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

Abstract

In this paper, we propose ARME (Assured Rate MAC Extension), an extension of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol to provide throughput guarantees. The proposed extension relies on the distributed coordination function (DCF) with a modified algorithm for the computation of the contention window (CW). Best effort service (with no throughput guarantee) is supported by the functionality of the current 802.11 standard in such a way that legacy IEEE 802.11 terminals behave as best effort terminals in ARME. The performance of the proposed extension has been extensively evaluated through simulation; simulation results show that IEEE 802.11 devices using ARME behave well for different types of traffic and different source rates.