Rether was originally developed to support guaranteed
Quality of Service (QoS) for shared Ethernet LANs.
With the growing
popularity of wireless LANs, we modified the Rether protocol to provide
QoS guarantee on wireless networks. In this paper, we present our
experiences with the design and implementation of the Wireless Rether
protocol for 802.11 networks. We also describe our understanding of
observed wireless LAN behavior. Wireless Rether supports QoS for
TCP and UDP traffic in both upstream and downstream directions.
The protocol can seamlessly inter-operate with any priority-based
QoS mechanisms (such as Diffserv) on the wired networks
that connect the wireless access network to the rest of the Internet.
QoS requirements of real-time applications are specified as a simple
configurable policy table. Legacy networking applications can benefit
from QoS guarantees provided by Wireless Rether without requiring any
modifications.
