Performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.11e EDCA access method

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are increasingly popular because of their flexibility. This spreading of WLANs comes with an increasing use of multimedia applications. Such applications are bandwidth sensitive and require a quality of service (QoS) that guarantees high performance transmission of continuous data. This requirement is the focus of the new enhanced IEEE 802.11e standard protocol for WLANs. This paper presents a simulation study of the enhanced distributed channel access method (EDCA) in the new IEEE 802.11e standard protocol. This protocol is evaluated to verify that it achieves superior QoS performance for real-time applications compared with the earlier legacy IEEE 802.11 DCF access method. A Simulation experiments - using the network simulator NS2- are carried out to compare the performance of both protocols regarding the throughput, delay, and jitter.