Service Differentiation Using the Capture Effect in 802.11 Wireless LANs

We investigate the effects of using dual transmission power to achieve quality-of-service (QoS) differentiation in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. Specifically, we assume all stations employ the standard IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF), with the exception that some stations transmit at a higher power than others. Consequently, in the event of a collision involving frames from both power levels, a high-power frame is more likely to be received correctly as a result of the so-called capture effect (i.e. received at a power sufficiently higher than that of the interference, allowing it to be decoded correctly). This effectively leads to QoS differentiation between two classes, corresponding to the high-power and low-power stations. We develop a Markov model for the IEEE 802.11 DCF in a network with dual transmission power over a Rayleigh-fading channel, and use it to evaluate the resulting performance, in terms of the key metrics of throughput and delay. We explore how the performance of the service classes depends on the proportion of stations in each class and the transmission power ratio, focusing in particular on the bounds achieved in the limit case of ´ideal differentiation´, characterised by a perfect capture probability of high-power frames. We find that significant performance differentiation between high-power and low-power stations is achieved even with transmission power ratios that are not very high, leading us to conclude that employing multiple transmission power levels is a viable and efficient approach for service quality differentiation in wireless LANs.