An analytical packet/flow-level modelling approach for wireless LANs with Quality-of-Service support

We present an analytical packet/flow-level modelling approach for the performance analysis of IEEE 802.11e WLAN, where we explicitly take into account QoS differentiation mechanisms based on minimum contention window size values and Arbitration InterFrame Space (AIFS) values, as included in the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol of the 802.11e standard. We first enhance the packet-level approach previously used for best-effort WLANs to include traffic classes with different QoS requirements. The packet-level model approach yields service weights that discriminate among traffic classes. From these observations, the packet/flow-level model for 802.11e is the \textit{generalized} discriminatory processor-sharing (GDPS) queueing model where the state-dependent system capacity is distributed among active traffic classes according to state-dependent priority weights. Extensive simulations show that the discriminatory processor-sharing model closely represents the flow behavior of 802.11e

A Comprehensive Study of the Enhanced Distributed Control Access (EDCA) Function

This technical report presents a comprehensive study of the Enhanced Distributed Control Access (EDCA) function defined in IEEE 802.11e. All the three factors are considered. They are: contention window size (CW), arbitration inter-frame space (AIFS), and transmission opportunity limit (TXOP). We first propose a discrete Markov chain model to describe the channel activities governed by EDCA. Then we evaluate the individual as well as joint effects of each factor on the throughput and QoS performance. We obtain several insightful observations showing that judiciously using the EDCA service differentiation mechanism is important to achieve maximum bandwidth utilization and user-specified QoS performance. Guided by our theoretical study, we devise a general QoS framework that provides QoS in an optimal way. The means of realizing the framework in a specific network is yet to be studied

A differentiated Services Architecture for Quality of Service Provisioning in Wireless Local Area Networks

Currently the issue of Quality of Service (QoS) is a major problem in IP networks due to the growth in multimedia traffic (e.g. voice and video applications) and therefore many mechanisms like IntServ, DiffServ, etc. have been proposed. Since the IEEE 802.11b (or Wi-Fi) standard was approved in 1999, it has gained in popularity to become the leading Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology with millions of such networks deployed worldwide. Wireless networks have a limited capacity (11 Mbits/s in the case of Wi-Fi networks) owing to the limited amount of frequency spectrum available. At any given time there may be a large number of users contending for access which results in the bandwidth available to each user being severely limited. Moreover, the system does not differentiate between traffic types which means that all traffic, regardless of its importance or priority, experiences the same QoS. An important network application requiring QoS guarantees is the provision of time-bounded services, such as voice over IP and video streaming, where the combination of packet delay, jitter and packet loss will impact on the perceived QoS. Consequently this has led to a large amount of research work focussing mainly on QoS enhancement schemes for the 802.11 MAC mechanism. The Task Group E of the IEEE 802.11 working group has been developing an extension to the Wi-Fi standard that proposes to make changes to the MAC mechanism to support applications with QoS requirements. The 802.11e QoS standard is currently undergoing final revisions before approval expected sometime in 2004. As 802.11e WLAN equipment is not yet available, performance reports can only be based on simulation. The objective of this thesis was to develop a computer simulator that implements the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard and to use this simulator to evaluate the QoS performance enhancement potential of 802.11e. This thesis discusses the QoS facilities, analyses the MAC protocol enhancements and compares them with the original 802.11 standard. The issue of QoS provisioning is primarily concerned with providing predictable performance guarantees with regard to throughput, packet delay, jitter and packet loss. The simulated results indicate that the proposed QoS enhancements to the MAC will considerably improve QoS performance in 802.11b WLANs. However, in order for the proposed 802.11e QoS mechanism to be effective the 802.11e parameters will need to be continually adjusted in order to ensure QoS guarantees are fulfilled for all traffic loads

Supporting Service Differentiation with Enhancements of the IEEE 802.11 MAC Protocol: Models and Analysis

As one of the fastest growing wireless access technologies, Wireless LANs must evolve to support adequate degrees of service differentiation. Unfortunately, current WLAN standards like IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) lack this ability. Work is in progress to define an enhanced version capable of supporting QoS for multimedia traffic at the MAC layer. In this paper, we aim at gaining insight into three mechanisms to differentiate among traffic categories, i.e., differentiating the minimum contention window size, the Inter-Frame Spacing (IFS) and the length of the packet payload according to the priority of different traffic categories. We propose an analysis model to compute the throughput and packet transmission delays. In additions, we derive approximations to get simpler but more meaningful relationships among different parameters. Comparisons with discrete-event simulation results show that a very good accuracy of performance evaluation can be achieved by using the proposed analysis model

Saturation Throughput Analysis of IEEE 802.11 in Presence of Non Ideal Transmission Channel and Capture Effects

In this paper, we provide a saturation throughput analysis of the IEEE 802.11 protocol at the data link layer by including the impact of both transmission channel and capture effects in Rayleigh fading environment. Impacts of both non-ideal channel and capture effects, specially in an environment of high interference, become important in terms of the actual observed throughput. As far as the 4-way handshaking mechanism is concerned, we extend the multi-dimensional Markovian state transition model characterizing the behavior at the MAC layer by including transmission states that account for packet transmission failures due to errors caused by propagation through the channel. This way, any channel model characterizing the physical transmission medium can be accommodated, including AWGN and fading channels. We also extend the Markov model in order to consider the behavior of the contention window when employing the basic 2-way handshaking mechanism. Under the usual assumptions regarding the traffic generated per node and independence of packet collisions, we solve for the stationary probabilities of the Markov chain and develop expressions for the saturation throughput as a function of the number of terminals, packet sizes, raw channel error rates, capture probability, and other key system parameters. The theoretical derivations are then compared to simulation results confirming the effectiveness of the proposed models.Comment: To appear on IEEE Transactions on Communications, 200