Differentiation mechanisms for IEEE 802.11

The IETF is currently working on service differentiation in the Internet. However, in wireless environments where bandwidth is scarce and channel conditions are variable, IP differentiated services are sub-optimal without lower layers' support. We present three service differentiation schemes for IEEE 802.11. The first one is based on scaling the contention window according to the priority of each flow or user. The second one assigns different inter-frame spacings to different users. Finally, the last one uses different maximum frame lengths for different users. We simulate and analyze the performance of each scheme with TCP and UDP flows.