Performance analysis and enhancements for IEEE 802.11e wireless networks

The IEEE 802.11 WLAN legacy standard cannot provide QoS support for multimedia applications. Thus, considerable research efforts have been carried out to enhance QoS support for 802.11. Among them, 802.11e is the upcoming QoS-enhanced standard proposed by the IEEE working group. This article describes in detail the new QoS features of 802.11e based on the latest version of the standard draft. We investigate the performance of 802.11e through computer simulations. Using simple examples, we show the effectiveness of adaptive schemes under the 802.11e framework.