An Algorithm for Dynamic Priority Assignment in 802.11e WLAN MAC Protocols

Nowadays, the need for communications systems able to contempo- rary support best-effort and "QoS sensitive" (real-time, for example) traffic, is constantly increasing. The urge is particularly felt in environments experiencing a dramatic growth, such as the Wireless LANs. Unfortunately, 802.11, which is the WLAN standard with the widest diffusion, does not seem to be able to satisfy those requirements. Many research efforts have been put to fill up this gap both by academic and standardization groups. They brought to the formalization of the IEEE 802.11e standard, representing a MAC layer enhancements of the former IEEE 802.11. This paper proposes an novel algorithm specifically tailored to dy- namically assign the priorities to the packets, depending on application level QoS requirements.