Analytical developments on QoS enhancements provided by IEEE 802.11 EDCA

This paper quantifies the gain in throughput and quality of service (QoS) provided by the EDCA MAC adopted in the current IEEE 802.11e WLAN draft compared to the traditional DCF. In that purpose, an analytical model is developed to compute the throughput in the single and multi-user cases with a non-ideal channel. This model is hacked with system simulations in realistic deployment scenarios. Results make a clear statement on the advantage of EDCA to guarantee some QoS. Final discussions provide inputs to further improve both the delivered QoS per user and the overall cell throughput for next generation of wireless LANs.