Investigation on the Performance of the IEE802.11n Based Wireless Networks for Multimedia Services

The high data rate of the IEEE 802.11n standard is due to its Physical layer Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system and MAC layer enhancement features. This rate enables the standard to support multimedia with Quality of Service (QoS) application through its Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) mechanism. This paper focuses on evaluating the QoS for the IEEE 802.11n Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). Three different number of node scenarios with one access point at different spatial streams (1, 2, 3 and 4) are considered in the process of investigating the network performance. The Riverbed Modeler 17.5 is used to model and simulate the proposed scenarios. Simulation results show an effective improvement in the performance when QoS is applied and with respect to the no QoS case, the 18 node number scenario (at 4×4 MIMO) shows a maximum improvement of 91.6% and 34.8% for throughput and delay respectively.