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 Dynamic Multimedia User-Weight Classification Scheme for IEEE_802.11 WLANs

In this paper we expose a dynamic traffic-classification scheme to support multimedia applications such as voice and broadband video transmissions over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Obviously, over a Wi-Fi link and to better serve these applications - which normally have strict bounded transmission delay or minimum link rate requirement - a service differentiation technique can be applied to the media traffic transmitted by the same mobile node using the well-known 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol. However, the given EDCA mode does not offer user differentiation, which can be viewed as a deficiency in multi-access wireless networks. Accordingly, we propose a new inter-node priority access scheme for IEEE 802.11e networks which is compatible with the EDCA scheme. The proposed scheme joins a dynamic user-weight to each mobile station depending on its outgoing data, and therefore deploys inter-node priority for the channel access to complement the existing EDCA inter-frame priority. This provides efficient quality of service control across multiple users within the same coverage area of an access point. We provide performance evaluations to compare the proposed access model with the basic EDCA 802.11 MAC protocol mode to elucidate the quality improvement achieved for multimedia communication over 802.11 WLANs.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC

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

Adaptive EDCF: Enhanced service differentiation for IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks

This paper describes an adaptive service differentiation scheme for QoS enhancement in IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks. Our approach, called adaptive enhanced distributed coordination function (AEDCF), is derived from the new EDCF introduced in the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard. Our scheme aims to share the transmission channel efficiently. Relative priorities are provisioned by adjusting the size of the contention window (CW) of each traffic class taking into account both applications requirements and network conditions. We evaluate through simulations the performance of AEDCF and compare it with the EDCF scheme proposed in the 802.11e. Results show that AEDCF outperforms the basic EDCF, especially at high traffic load conditions. Indeed, our scheme increases the medium utilization ratio and reduces for more than 50% the collision rate. While achieving delay differentiation, the overall goodput obtained is up to 25% higher than EDCF. Moreover, the complexity of AEDCF remains similar to the EDCF scheme, enabling the design of cheap implementations

Providing Dynamic TXOP for QoS Support of Video Transmission in IEEE 802.11e WLANs

The IEEE 802.11e standard introduced by IEEE 802.11 Task Group E (TGe) enhances the Quality of Service (QoS) by means of HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA). The scheduler of HCCA allocates Transmission Opportunities (TXOPs) to QoS-enabled Station (QSTA) based on their TS Specifications (TSPECs) negotiated at the traffic setup time so that it is only efficient for Constant Bit Rate (CBR) applications. However, Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffics are not efficiently supported as they exhibit nondeterministic profile during the time. In this paper, we present a dynamic TXOP assignment Scheduling Algorithm for supporting the video traffics transmission over IEEE 802.11e wireless networks. This algorithm uses a piggybacked information about the size of the subsequent video frames of the uplink traffic to assist the Hybrid Coordinator accurately assign the TXOP according to the fast changes in the VBR profile. The proposed scheduling algorithm has been evaluated using simulation with different variability level video streams. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the delay experienced by VBR traffic streams comparable to HCCA scheduler due to the accurate assignment of the TXOP which preserve the channel time for transmission.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1602.0369

Adaptive medium access control for VoIP services in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract- Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is an important service with strict Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The popular Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) of IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol adopts a Binary Exponential Back-off (BEB) procedure to reduce the packet collision probability in WLANs. In DCF, the size of contention window is doubled upon a collision regardless of the network loads. This paper presents an adaptive MAC scheme to improve the QoS of VoIP in WLANs. This scheme applies a threshold of the collision rate to switch between two different functions for increasing the size of contention window based on the status of network loads. The performance of this scheme is investigated and compared to the original DCF using the network simulator NS-2. The performance results reveal that the adaptive scheme is able to achieve the higher throughput and medium utilization as well as lower access delay and packet loss probability than the original DCF