Applications and challenges of the 802.11e EDCA mechanism: an experimental study

In this article we conduct an experimental study of the enhanced distributed channel access mechanism of the upcoming 802.11e standard. The main focus of the study is on two applications of EDCA: traffic engineering and service guarantees. With traffic engineering we aim at distributing the bandwidth in the WLAN according to a given throughput allocation criterion. With service guarantees the objective is to ensure that the performance metrics (throughput and delay) experienced by a station meet a given quality criterion. We build a testbed with wireless cards that support a substantial subset of the EDCA functionality and analyze performance against different sets of requirements. Experimental results show that EDCA can effectively be used for traffic engineering purposes. The goal of providing service guarantees with EDCA is shown to be more challenging; we identify future research directions that need to be addressed in order to achieve this goal.

[1]  A. M. Abdullah,et al.  Wireless lan medium access control (mac) and physical layer (phy) specifications , 1997 .

[2]  CantieniGion Reto,et al.  Performance analysis under finite load and improvements for multirate 802.11 , 2005 .

[3]  Prasun Sinha,et al.  Understanding TCP fairness over wireless LAN , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[4]  Frank Roijers,et al.  Performance analysis of wireless LANs: an integrated packet/flow level approach , 2003 .

[5]  Parameswaran Ramanathan,et al.  A case for relative differentiated services and the proportional differentiation model , 1999, IEEE Netw..

[6]  Jean-Yves Le Boudec,et al.  Delay jitter bounds and packet scale rate guarantee for expedited forwarding , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[7]  Martin Heusse,et al.  Performance anomaly of 802.11b , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[8]  Brahim Bensaou,et al.  Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11e contention-based channel access , 2004, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[9]  Thierry Turletti,et al.  Performance analysis under finite load and improvements for multirate 802.11 , 2005, Comput. Commun..

[10]  Albert Banchs,et al.  Providing throughput guarantees in IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN , 2002, 2002 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Record. WCNC 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8609).