An analytical model for IEEE 802.11e EDCA

Quality of service (QoS) support in wireless LAN (WLAN) is the main mission of the IEEE 802.11 group e. It uses enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) to differentiate service of priorities by means of various inter-frame spaces (IFS) and contention windows (CW). In order to efficiently manage QoS for the IEEE 802.11e networks, throughput and MAC delay for several traffic flows from 4 different access categories (AC) should be more accurately estimated. A four-dimensional Markov model is proposed to evaluate these. The correctness of our analysis has been validated via simulation results. Throughout our model, call admission control (CAC) can be easily applied, and thus resource management for QoS support for multimedia applications is well achieved.