Evaluating the QoS of WLANs for the IEEE 802.11 EDCF in real-time applications

There are real challenges in both the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) protocol and the medium access control (MAC)-functions providing the required quality-of-service, high throughput and minimum latencies. The IEEE 802.11 layer supports both the distributed coordination function (DCF) and the enhanced DCF (EDCF). The different access categories (AC) within the EDCF can enhance the quality of WLAN. In the current work, two scenarios are investigated; both use the same parameters from the physical (PHY) and MAC layers. In comparison to the DCF, our results show that EDCF offers a significant enhancement for real-time applications (e.g. audio- and video-streaming).