Analysis of EDCA MAC throughput for the IEEE 802.11e WLANs

IEEE 802.11e MAC (medium access control) is one of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN (wireless local area network) standards define for QoS (quality of service) support on the wireless communications. The 802.11e MAC is based on both center controlled channel access and contention-based channel access mechanisms. EDCA (enhanced distributed coordination function) is contention-based channel access mechanism which provides differentiated channel access method for frames that have different priorities. In this paper, we analyze and compare both theoretical throughput value of EDCA MAC and throughput value of FPGA (field-programmable gate array) implemented EDCA MAC platform at MAC layer. The QAP (QoS access point) is provided with EDCA function and the station is provided with DCF (distributed coordination function). The results on throughput evaluation of the FPGA implemented EDCA MAC Platform shows 92. 6 ~ 94.3% as much as theoretical throughputs of the EDCA MAC Simulation. The parameters evaluated for the throughput measurement are 802.11a PHY, offered load, access category, frame size and number of stations. The results show various throughput values in accordance to the measurement parameter changes.