QoS Analysis of IEEE 802.11/802.11e MAC Protocols

IEEE802.11 working group has provided an enhancement to previous IEEE802.11 WLAN standard designated as IEEE802.11e to offer improved quality of service (QoS) to multimedia and other real time applications. The focus of this work is to analyze and compare the QoS performance of IEEE802.11e and IEEE802.11 WLAN medium access protocols. Latency, Throughput and Packet Loss Ratio are used as basic QoS comparison metrics for this analysis. Simulation results show that IEEE802.11e out performs legacy IEEE802.11 in terms of quality of service due to its flow differentiated channel allocation and better queue management architecture. IEEE802.11 protocol is found better than IEEE802.11e in collision resolution when the network is highly congested