Analysis of IEEE 802.11e QoS in multimedia environment

The 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) has been created as wireless supplement to wired Ethernet, with one type of service for all, i.e. best-effort. However, bandwidth and delay can not be guaranteed in such wireless system, especially in the unlicensed spectrum. To solve this problem, the IEEE 802.11 committee has developed enhancements to the original 802.11 MAC layer, i.e. 802.11e. The scope of this paper is focused on performance analysis of 802.11e in a multimedia environment, including voice, video and data traffic. The results showed that quality of service parameters, such as delay and throughput, significantly depend upon the correct choice of the 802.11e parameters such as AIFS, CW, and TXOP.