Theoretical performance evaluation of EDCA in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

Abstract

While the original IEEE 802.11 distributed coordinated function (DCF) has been widely analysed by both theoretical and simulation studies, the performance of the new IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) has not yet been investigated extensively. In this paper, we extend an analytical model to capture the operations of the arbitrary inter-frame space, contention window differentiation and transmission opportunity in EDCA for the evaluation of throughput performance and collision probability of different service classes. The performance analyses are validated by simulation results. Our analysis provides insightful results for evaluating the impact of different priority parameters on the performance of EDCA service differentiation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.