QoS Traffic in Wireless LAN Overlapping Cells

The IEEE 802.11 standard is playing an increasingly important role in next generation mobile radio networks. In order to fulfill the requirements of such networks, the Wireless LAN technology has to provide mechanisms for transporting Quality-of-Service (QoS) enabled traffic in large Wireless LAN deployments. In this paper, we show that the existing Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols perform well within single cell scenarios, but their performance drops drastically in environments with overlapping cells. Therefore, we evaluate the robustness of the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) MAC protocol in different scenarios with overlapping cells.