Game-Theoretic EDCA in IEEE 802.11e WLANs

In IEEE 802.11 WLANs, the fundamental MAC mechanism - DCF, only supports best-effort service, and is unaware of QoS. IEEE 802.11e EDCA supports service differentiation by differentiating contention parameters. This may introduce the problem of selfish traffics with rational nodes. Hence, game-theoretic EDCA (G-EDCA) is proposed in this paper to solve the problem. Moreover, a simple and run-time estimation mechanism is presented to implement G-EDCA in current WLANs. Extensive simulations are also carried out to compare the performances of DCF, EDCA and G-EDCA. The simulation results show that G-EDCA performs better than DCF and EDCA in terms of system throughput and QoS.