Delayed Channel Access for IEEE 802.11e Based WLAN

In this paper we investigate the effect of interaction between the EDCA prioritized channel access mechanism defined in the IEEE 802.11e draft standard and the improved asynchronous data service defined in both the 802.11e draft standard and current TGn proposals and identify a significant negative impact on system performance. Based on network traffic characteristics, we introduce an algorithm, Delayed Channel Access (DCA), to address the system performance problem originating from this interaction. Using a simulator developed for TGn proposals, we validate that the DCA improves the system performance significantly and hence effectively addresses the issues that have been identified.