Fairness of the IEEE 802.11n aggregation scheme for real time application in unsaturated condition

One of the challenges in today's wireless networks is to provide appropriate throughput and delay for data and multimedia application. Although IEEE802.11e (EDCA) standard is concerned to support QoS in wireless networks, it cannot provide strict QoS required by real-time and multimedia services without proper network control mechanisms. The recent standard 802.11n introduced new MAC access mechanism based on aggregation scheme. In this paper, we aim to develop an analytical model for throughput and end-to-end delay under unsaturated 802.11n network taking in consideration the different Access Categories (AC) priorities. Based on simulation results, we demonstrate that even with aggregation mechanism, 802.11n is not able to guarantee QoS for high priority traffics.