Adaptive TXOP Allocation Based on Channel Conditions and Traffic Requirements in IEEE 802.11e Networks

IEEE 802.11e has established a new access mechanism called the hybrid coordination function (HCF) as a step toward provisioning quality-of service (QoS) support. In this mechanism, a simple HCF scheduler is introduced to take the QoS requirements of admitted flows into account and allocate transmission opportunities (TXOPs), which is the time under which a station (STA) can send its burst of data packets, to STAs. Although many approaches have been taken to address the mechanism's inherent problems, unsubstantial effort has been afforded in tackling a channel-aware allocation mechanism. An STA can be in either the good or bad channel state in any feasible data rate, which can be modeled as a Markov chain of two states for each data rate. In view of this, we propose a mechanism of adaptive TXOP allocation that is applicable to existing scheduling algorithms. Our method works in accordance with channel and traffic conditions and complies with the link adaptation mechanism. Extensive simulation results verify that our method shows improved performance while ensuring long-term fairness among STAs and being adaptive to the channel conditions and underlying physical transmission rates.