THE INFLUENCE OF MAC BUFFER ON THE CONTENTION-BASED ACCESS SCHEME WITH BURSTING OPTION FOR IEEE 802.11E WIRELESS NETWORKS

Wireless LANs are increasingly being used for inelastic applications. Currently, there is little support for quality of service in the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, and IEEE task group E has defined the 802.11e MAC extension. Enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) is a contention-based scheme of the 802.11e standard. To allow a station to transmit more than one frame from a single contention, an optional feature known as controlled frame-bursting (CFB) is introduced in the standard. In this paper, we initially performed an average analysis to determine a suitable burst duration limit. Then, a detailed evaluation and comparison of the EDCA protocol with the CFB option is carried out through simulation to quantify its performance gain. The impact of the MAC transmit buffer size is also incorporated. Accordingly, we have proposed a suitable approach to guide the configuration of the burst duration limit. It is demonstrated that an optimized CFB configuration allows the MAC protocol to achieve 30% more capacity than the basic EDCA scheme.