Saturation Performance Assessment of Differentiation Services Supported in IEEE 802.11e

Abstract

In the emerging standard IEEE 802.11e, the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) is specified to support quality-of-service (QoS) in wireless local area networks (WLAN). This paper aims at providing a thoroughly analytical model that captures the operation of the AIFSs, contention window sizes and retry limits differentiation for different services of the EDCA mechanism under saturation condition based on a three-dimensional Markov Chain model. The analytical model is validated and provides an in-depth understanding and insights into the EDCA protocol, and effectiveness of different parameters on the system performance in terms of system throughput and frame dropping probability for differentiation services traffic is investigated through extensive numerical and simulation results. Moreover, the analytical model can be cooperated into the admission control algorithm with different parameters in terms of AIFS, contention window sizes and retry limits.