An analytical model for IEEE 802.11e EDCF differential services

Having been originally developed as an extension of the wired LANs, IEEE 802.11 lacks support for QoS and differential services. Since its introduction various extensions and modifications have been studied to address this current need and the IEEE 802.11 Task Group E is responsible for developing a QoS-aware MAC protocol that considers several service differentiation mechanisms. In this paper, we first consider the enhanced DCF access method of IEEE 802.11e. We then introduce an analytical model, which can be used to calculate the traffic priority and throughput corresponding to the configuration of multiple DCF contention parameters under saturation condition. A detailed simulation is provided to validate the proposed model.