Admission Control Policy for WLAN Systems based on the “Capacity Region”

This paper deals with the definition of an Admission Control (AC) policy for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) systems applicable to Real-Time (RT) services. The proposed AC policy is based on an analytical model, able to predict the performance of the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) of IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC). Results provided by the model for the considered real-time services are exploited in order to identify the maximum number of users for each class (i.e. services mix) that a 802.11b,a,g Basic Service Set (BSS) can support, taking into account the Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. The work has been carried out within the framework of EVEREST project, in which specific radio resource management strategies and algorithms for supporting QoS in heterogeneous beyond 3G networks are investigated.