Delay-Sensitive Smart Polling in Dense IEEE 802.11n Network for Quality of Service.

In this paper, the polling mechanism of IEEE 802.11n standard is examined with the objective of reducing the delay induced by polling a large number of stations in crowded hotspot. This standard, also known as high speed Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), is competent to become carrier Wi-Fi in the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). Scheduling algorithms are playing a major role in yielding QoS in high speed wireless networks of next generation. IEEE 802.11n standard has some support for Quality of Service (QoS)-based scheduling, but one that focuses on polling is not dealt with much in detail. Polling is a centralized scheduling which is initiated by the Access Point (AP) to poll user stations. Most of the proposed polling mechanisms introduce delay when the number of stations under a given access point increases. The aim of this paper is to introduce new polling algorithm based on two-level priority queues to reduce the polling delay in a crowded WLAN hotspot. This in turn assures the QoS guarantees for delay-sensitive applications. The new algorithm is named as Smart_Poll. The paper also discusses the performance estimation of the proposed smart polling by comparing it with traditional polling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]