Multimedia Priority Service over Wi-Fi Networks

Communication is a crucial capability for people with national security and emergency preparedness (NSEP)11For example, NSEP Services are available in the United States as Government Emergency Telecommunications Service and Wireless Priority Service (https://www.cisa.gov/priority-telecommunications-services). responsibilities. There are several scenarios where Wi-Fi22Wi-Fi is a brand name and a trademark of Wi-Fi Alliance (https://www.wi-fi.org/). access networks may provide the best or only means for NSEP users to access the global communication infrastructure. However, unless communications traffic associated with NSEP users receives priority access to the wireless medium, it could experience significant performance degradation if the access network, which might be shared with a large number of non-NSEP users, is congested. Realizing this need for priority treatment of NSEP users' traffic, efforts are underway to define a Multimedia Priority Service33To support MPS, priority access capabilities are also defined in 3GPP (see TS 22.153: Multimedia Priority Service). (NSEP priority access) within IEEE 802.11be: Enhancement for extremely high throughput (EHT) [1], a next generation amendment of the IEEE 802.11 standard [2]. The NSEP priority access features encompass medium access control layer capabilities for discovery, verification of NSEP authorization, and invocation/revocation of priority access, and a mechanism to provide priority channel access to NSEP users' traffic. They are specified in IEEE 802.11be generically as Emergency Preparedness Communication Service priority access features. The performance study described in this article demonstrates that even in heavily congested Wi-Fi networks it is possible, using a scheme within the quality of service framework specified in IEEE 802.11be, to provide priority to NSEP traffic with limited negative impact on non-priority real-time traffic.