Performance and Fairness Analysis of a QoS Supportive MAC Protocol for Wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) is developed to provide Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) with Quality of Service (QoS) support. Several solutions have been proposed in order to provide a fair channel access for all competing stations. This paper first studies the QoS capabilities of the Adaptive Weighted and Prioritized Polling (AWPP) protocol that adopts the frame structure and the basic polling scheme of the Priority Oriented Adaptive Polling (POAP) protocol. Our analytical approach is validated by plotting analytical results against simulation outcome. We then explore the fairness provision of the AWPP protocol utilizing Jain´s fairness index. Finally, we provide a comparative performance analysis between EDCA, POAP and AWPP protocols and we demonstrate that AWPP outperforms the other two.