Providing Quality of Service in the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function

Wireless networks are becoming more and more common in today’s networking environment. One of the earliest of the IEEE standards for wireless networks is the IEEE 802.11 standard. Most communications in an 802.11 network use the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). Unfortunately, the 802.11 DCF was not designed with Quality of Service (QoS) in mind. However, as more and more applications tend to be run on the 802.11 network, there is a growing demand for QoS, even in the DCF. Recently researchers have emulated a shortest job first scheduling policy by using a new resetting backoff technique in DCF. In this paper, we take advantage of this new backoff technique to provide a new level of QoS to the DCF of the IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. To the authors knowledge this is the first work to address scheduling Diffserv traffic classes in a wireless network environment.