Performance evaluation of an enhanced distributed channel access protocol under heterogeneous traffic

Recently there have been considerable interests focusing on the performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11e medium access control (MAC) protocols, which were proposed for supporting quality of services (QoS) in wireless local area networks (WLANs). Different from most existing work, this study has conducted comprehensive performance evaluation and analysis of the IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) protocol in the presence of heterogeneous network traffic including nonbursty Poisson, bursty ON/OFF, and self-similar traffic generated by wireless multimedia applications. The performance results on throughput, access delay and medium utilization have demonstrated that the protocol is able to achieve satisfying QoS differentiation for heterogeneous multimedia traffic. On the other hand the results have showed that IEEE 802.11e EDCA suffering from the low medium utilization due to the overhead generated by transmission collisions and back-off processes.