The Importance of Air Time Allocation in Wi-Fi Quality of Service

With the proliferation of Multi-SSID Wireless gateways that offer multiple services such as an in-home private network, Home Security and Appliance Monitoring, Public Hotspots and Video over Wi-Fi; the need to monitor and assure basic service levels and an overall Quality of Service (QoS) becomes essential to the user’s quality of experience.

Through a series of real-life tests, this paper will show how these competing services can impact the home user’s wireless experience, in both single user and multi user environments. We demonstrate how the shortcomings of existing wireless systems, the limits of existing Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM), and the lack of proper QoS monitoring and enforcement mechanisms can degrade the user experience and create severe subscriber retention problems.

This paper will show that the critical resource on the wireless network is not raw bandwidth management but rather comprehensive management of the time allotted on the air interface, or Air Time Management. Lastly, a variety of options will be discussed illustrating methods of avoiding delivery of a poor user experience and guaranteeing an acceptable basic service level.