Gaussian Approximation Based Admission Control for Variable Bit Rate Traffic in IEEE 802.11e WLANs

For QoS requirements of real-time traffic, IEEE 802.11 working group introduces a QoS-aware channel access mechanism, called hybrid coordination function (HCF), which consists of contention-based enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) and contention-free HCF controlled channel access (HCCA). The TXOP allocation and the admission control units of the HCCA reference scheduler are only appropriate for constant bit rate (CBR) flows. It may result in serious packet loss for variable bit rate (VBR) flows. In this paper, we propose a simple admission control algorithm which adopts Gaussian distribution to approximate VBR traffic. Numerical results obtained from computer simulations show that our proposed algorithm can effectively and efficiently allocate transmission opportunity (TXOP) durations to QoS-enhanced stations (QSTAs) to guarantee a predefined packet loss probability. Moreover, our proposed scheme can easily handle multiple VBR flows of the same QSTA to get the advantage of multiplexing gain.