Dynamic frame aggregation scheduler for multimedia applications in IEEE 802.11n networks

• Published in: Transactions on emerging telecommunications technologies Vol. 28; no. 2
• Main Authors: Charfi, Emna, Gueguen, Cédric, Chaari, Lamia, Cousin, Bernad, Kamoun, Lotfi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley-Blackwell 01-02-2017
• Subjects: Computer Science; Networking and Internet Architecture; IEEE 80211n; optimized frame aggregation; urgency delay; computer networking; waiting delay; frame scheduler
• ISSN: 2161-3915; 2161-3915
• DOI: 10.1002/ett.2942

Providing quality of service (QoS) for real time applications over wireless local area networks is becoming a very challenging task due to the diversity of multimedia applications. Concurrently, there are numerous wireless local area networks WLAN(s) devices that are rising today. In the current paper, we focus on Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11n because it was designed to support a high data transmission rate (towards 600 Mbps). It is based on frame aggregation schemes that accumulate many subframes to be transmitted into a single larger frame. Thus overheads are reduced, efficiency and throughput are improved. However, it increases delay particularly for low rate applications. In fact, when the queue is empty, the medium access control layer (MAC) has to wait other packets to arrive in the queue to construct the whole aggregated frame. Moreover, if flows are not served, they will be accumulated in the queue causing an increased delay. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new dynamic frame aggregation (DFA) scheduler to provide QoS satisfaction to real time services. DFA schedules flows based on urgency delay and waiting delay, then it dynamically adjusts the payload size of aggregated frame. Conducted simulations prove that the proposed DFA scheduler provides QoS delay and throughput guarantee, and it reduces the number of dropped packets. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We propose a new scheduler called Dynamic Frame Aggregation (DFA) scheduler for IEEE 802.11n network to achieve a best trade‐off in terms of realizing the maximum throughput with the minimum delay for different traffic loads. DFA defines new scheduling metrics such as Urgency delay (UD) and Waiting delay (WD). High priority is given for packets having the lowest UD. Then, the payload size of aggregated frame will be adjusted based on UD of the first sub‐frame.