Performance Analysis and Evaluation of EDCF Supporting Fairness in Wireless LANs

Wireless LAN (WLAN) has greatly benefited from the introduction of various technologies, such as MAC protocol and scheduling algorithm. The majority of these technologies focus on fairness or service differentiation. However, it is difficult to use these technologies to provide many benefits to WLAN simultaneously because the current WLAN system only focuses on the provision of a single aspect of QoS. Unfortunately, multimedia applications require both service differentiation and fairness. Therefore, this paper combines Distributed Fair Scheduling (DFS) and Enhanced Distributed Coordinate Function (EDCF), to provide both fairness and service differentiation simultaneously. Furthermore, we show numerical analysis using Markov process. The simulation results demonstrate that F-EDCF outperforms the EDCF, in terms of throughput, fairness, and delay viewpoints.