QoS-aware Wireless MAC Protocol Using Network Load Adaptation

In these days the requests for various multimedia services and the Quality of Service (QoS) support have been one of key issues in wireless data communications. Therefore the research relative to Medium Access Control (MAC) has been progressing rapidly. Especially A number of QoS-aware MAC schemes have been introduced to extend the legacy IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol which has not guaranteed any service differentiation. However, none of those schemes fulfill both QoS features and channel efficiency although these support the service differentiation based on priority. Therefore this paper studies a novel MAC scheme, referred to as Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function with Network Adaptation (EDCF-NA), for enhancements of both QoS and medium efficiency. It uses a smart factor denoted by ACK rate and Network Load Threshold (TH). In this paper, we study how the value of TH has effect on both the QoS performance and the channel efficiency via Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) simulations.