A novel MAC and Scheduling strategy to guarantee QoS for the new-generation WIND-FLEX wireless LAN

The novel W-LAN currently developed in the framework of the WIND-FLEX project of theEuropean IST Program, suitable for small-office home-office environments, is described. Particular emphasis is given to the MAC layer, which provides efficient utilization of the channel capacity and includes a Scheduler as an efficient means to guarantee quality of service. WINDFLEX devices exchange data at rates ranging from 64 kb/s to 100 Mb/s over a 50 MHz channel at 7.1 GHz. The modulation is adaptive OFDM, the access scheme TDMA, the duplexing technique asymmetric TDD. The MAC controls the adaptivity of the physical layer by adjusting a set of parameters based on some link measurements. The WIND-FLEX network is full-meshed single-hop and is based on a master/slave architecture where the master acts as the coordination point (but not as a relay or base station). Computer simulations show the efficiency of the proposed strategy in terms of delay and packet loss, also checking the system capability to support high traffic loads.