IEEE 802.11 Load balancing: an approach for QoS Enhancement

Issam Jabri (1, 2) , Nicolas Krommenacker (1) , Thierry Divoux (1) , Adel Soudani (2)

1 CRAN - Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy
2 EμE - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Microélectronique [Monastir]

With the 802.11 WLAN multimedia applications (Video, Audio, real-time voice over IP,...) increasing, the customers demand more and more new features and functions. Providing Quality of Service (QoS) support is very important since the original standard doesn't take QoS into account. The standard offers access to the wireless users only regarding for physical considerations. This can lead to heavily overloaded access points (AP) and considerable degradation of the QoS. This paper deals with this problem. It focuses on the presentation of QoS management solution for wireless communication system. It, mainly, presents the fact that a balanced distribution of mobile stations among the available Access Points leads to a better performances of the Wireless LAN. OPNET simulations of the proposed approach are used to show a best resources allocation and efficiency on QoS metrics. A protocol structure between mobiles and APs is also specified for the installation of this approach. An SDL description and MSC simulation is provided as a first step in the development of this protocol.

Mots clés: IEEE802.11; Load Balancing; Quality of Service; Protocol Specification; OPNET

Domaines: Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Issam Jabri, Nicolas Krommenacker, Thierry Divoux, Adel Soudani. IEEE 802.11 Load balancing: an approach for QoS Enhancement. International Journal of Wireless Information Networks, 2008, 15 (1), pp.16-30. ⟨10.1007/s10776-008-0072-y⟩. ⟨hal-00326059⟩