Lottery Scheduling for Flexible and Fine-grained
Bandwidth Management in Wireless LANs
Shravan Rayanchu, Sharad Saha
Abstract:
Emerging applications such as VoIP, Multimedia streaming require certain Quality of Service(QoS) guarantees in order to satisfy the requirements of their users. In today's wireless LANs the administrator has little or no control over the amount of bandwidth consumed by different flows or even different traffic classes. Flow level control is beyond the capabilities of the current systems and is desirable in networks which have multiple input flows with different QoS requirements. Towards this end, we propose a probabilistic solution based on lottery scheduling between competing flows for a proportional allocation of the wireless bandwidth. Lottery scheduling when used in conjuction with policies (taken as input) provides a simple and scalable solution for flexible and fine-grained wireless bandwidth management. Our solution works across across different protocols and takes into account the traffic characteristics of the competing flows using the concept of ticket adjustments. We have implemented a prototype lottery scheduler on the madwifi wireless driver and found that it provides a flexible control over the wireless bandwidth, achieving the desired throughput proportions between the flows in the network.
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