Traffic shaping in wireless home networks

Many devices commonly found in wireless home networks such as smartphones, gaming consoles and media servers generate real-time traffic with stringent performance requirements. Since the wireless medium is mostly accessed in a distributed manner (DCF), sensitive traffic needs to be "protected". This work investigates how mechanisms defined in the WiFi standard such as virtual carrier sensing and CTS frames can enable this without requiring any modifications to end devices. ns-3 simulations of this scheme in typical wireless home network configurations show significant performance improvement in the delivery rate of prioritized nodes compared to those using plain DCF.