QOE-based dynamic resource allocation for multimedia traffic in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

The multimedia streams over the wireless access networks has increased dramatically over the past few years. Since the wireless link is featured with restricted bandwidth and limited resources, increasing demand of real-time applications imposes challenges on wireless networks to provide Quality of Service (QoS). Plenty of schemes were proposed to provide QoS, among which the admission control is a typical method. However, admission control mechanisms only consider the case at the network entering phase. After the admission, another mechanism is needed to continue to monitor the ongoing traffic and to react to fluctuation of resource consumption during the connection. Therefore, other than only using admission control schemes, which try to restrict access to the network, schemes to control on-going best-effort background are proposed in this paper. The proposed dynamical halting and resuming schemes of background traffic provide a finer way to allocate resources for video streams. It is shown via extensive simulations that proposed schemes can provide direct and solid enhancement of Quality-of-Experience (QoE) for video subscribers, and achieve good tradeoff between video quality and bandwidth utilization. © 2011 IEEE.