ACKS: a technique to reduce the impact of legacy stations in 802.11e EDCA WLANs

The EDCA access mechanism of the upcoming 802.11e standard supports legacy DCF stations, but with substantially degraded performance. The reason being that DCF stations typically compete for access with overly small contention windows (CWs). In this letter we propose a new technique that, implemented at the access points (AP's), mitigates the impact of legacy stations on EDCA. The key idea of the technique is that, upon receiving a frame from a legacy station, the AP skips the ACK frame reply with a certain probability. When missing the ACK, the legacy station increases its CW and thus our technique allows us to have some control over the CW's of the legacy stations. We show by means of an example that this technique improves the overall performance of the WLAN.