Frame Dropping: a QoS mechanism for multimedia communications in WiFi hot spots

In recent years the idea of access network has changed radically, and the diffusion of wireless technologies, and especially IEEE 802.11 compliant devices, has made wireless connections increasing popular. Despite the great success of the IEEE 802.11 standard, several problems concerning security, power consumption and quality of service of wireless LANs remain partially unsolved. The QoS issue is especially relevant for multimedia communications, generally needing performance guarantees from the network infrastructure to fulfill application requirements. In this paper we analyze the behavior of the Frame Dropping (FD) mechanism, a QoS mechanism for multimedia communications using simulations, and compare it with that of another well assessed mechanism: Distributed Fair Scheduling (DFS). Simulation results show that, though DFS achieve a better channel utilization, FD behavior is comparable with that of DFS under all the main performance indices, and it exhibits effective traffic differentiation capabilities.